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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I would be fine with a free market system if the liability shield was removed.

But in a real free market, a condition of sale could be that you wave any legal liability for injury.

Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?

Some people would I suppose, but only some, and with governments you don't get to price in that choice, you get to be experimented on regardless.

The problem is, we don’t have cures. We have drugs that at particular doses have positive risk/benefit ratios for a particular condition for most patients. If every bottle of Tylenol is priced to cover the liability for liver damage I’m not sure pharmacies continue to exist.

Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?

Probably approximately the same proportion of the population that uses software and websites with terms of service saying you promise to hand over your first-born have no privacy? i.e., nearly everyone because that's just every product on the market.

Agreed you could waive liability but again I’m struggling with the basic economics. If the vaccines offer a lot of value and very limited harm the liability point shouldnt be a big issue.

The issue is that rare coincidence do happen and causality isn't well-defined on an individual scale anyway.

For example, a lot of farmers used glyphosate (roundup) and, of them, a number of them (somewhat proportional to the overall risk) got rare cancers. Then those folks sued on a theory of causality that most scientists roundly reject, but won anyway.

But consider a hypothetical second agent that we know beyond a doubt increases the risk of some rare cancer by 25% (a huge relative risk). 5 farmers get this cancer and sue. Of them, 4 would have gotten it anyway and 1 got it due to agent. It's not just that a scientifically ignorant jury can't figure that out -- there is no answer. We can't assign that down to the individual level in that way -- all we know is something about aggregate risk.

You can't trust the US legal system to determine if a vaccine caused an injury.

Why?

The jury system is not good at determining medical causation.

Total immunity is a problem, but if the government had agreed to take on the risk for the pharma companies in this emergency situation instead of just waving it away (including paying out for vaccine injuries) that seems much more balanced. Operation Warp Speed was pretty much about "how fast can we get this done?" and that includes speeding up the safety trials. I don't know what the US actually did here.

The issue with that is the government socializes costs but privatizes benefits. So what do you predict would be the outcome?

The fact that the State is an infinite well of everyone's money in this case makes this functionally the same.

Without a bounded fiscal policy, there is no incentive for the government to take the liability risk seriously. For this decision to have any chance to be good, whoever takes it actually has to shoulder some risk if they take the wrong one.

The US situation is kinda a clusterfuck.

Most vaccines fall under the NCVIA, so any claims of injury go to the NVICP, where the standard of proof is hilariously low. It's a little more strict than a 'damn that's an ugly baby' fund, but not by much, and the willingness of the program to accept sometimes implausible alleged links has been used as support for no small number of implausible further links. Funds are drawn from a vaccine excise tax, which in theory, and in practice is a mix of Medi*, insurance and private dollars.

COVID vaccines were specifically exempted by the PREP Act in a different way, falling under the CICP. Where NCVIA is extremely fail-positive, CICP is the reverse: requiring "compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence", and very happy to can claims over minor paperwork faults. As a result, the lack of any successful claims even into mid-2022 drove a lot of skepticism, and while they've since recognized some, the numbers remain implausibly low.

((There are some similar exceptions for smallpox vaccines and I think the military anthrax vaccine.))

I think it's more incompetence than malice, but the inability to find the Goldilocks zone badly undermines institutional trust.

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