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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1670 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do you have evidence for this?

Evidence that the COVID vax recommendations were not primarily motivated by benefit to the individual recipients?

<gestures wildly at 'everything'>

Recommending them for children at all (or anyone under ~40 really) is a good starting point -- the age stratification of severity was never remotely uncertain.

Imagine for a second you belief the vaccines are safe.

Great, even if fatality rates for kids from COVID were super low....well what's the harm? Plus you get the added benefit of herd immunity!

This sounds like a wonderful idea.

Now we know now that the benefits don't seem to outweigh the risks in a few specific populations - but the problem was that the acute nature of the situation and the politics (as well as some considerable stress) broke a lot of people's brains. Lots of stuff does that - see both pro and anti Trump people.

None of that applies to the general issue of vaccines.

Lots of people had questions and concerns about COVID related decision making. They were forcibly muzzled.

The most right wing pediatrician I know who puts on a MAGA hat after work, his response to general vaccine hesitancy is to imagine the parents alone with him in a dark room.

Their isn't any credible debate for most of the vaccine schedule and what exists (ex: Rotavirus) is quite healthy.

Imagine for a second you belief the vaccines are safe.

Great, even if fatality rates for kids from COVID were super low....well what's the harm? Plus you get the added benefit of herd immunity!

This sounds like a wonderful idea.

Not to me -- the safety of these particular vaccines vis a vis myocarditis is still kind of up in the air AFAIC, but giving the benefit of the doubt on that due to fog of war doesn't get you off the hook. They were also produced on an accelerated timeline as compared to what's normally considered safe by the FDA, and contained some pretty new tech. Even if you believe that vaccines in general are safe, there were unknown unknowns with these ones that really require a sane cost-benefit assessment.

Anyways, if it's such a wonderful idea, why didn't the public health people make that argument instead of trotting out every cancer kid they could find who had the bad luck to die of (or with) covid and scream to anyone who would listen "GET YOUR KIDS VAXXED -- YOU DON'T WANT CHILDREN TO DIE, DO YOU?"?

I don't disagree that the approach was mangled but I think the science is settled now and for adults its something like benefits outweigh the risks for everyone except for very young men (I don't know kids though).

This was a unique situation though where people very publicly turned off their brains because of politics. That doesn't happen very often, and it's always pretty obvious when it's happening (still the case with any medical content that is significantly woke adjacent).

Most of public health this caveat does not apply.

That doesn't happen very often, and it's always pretty obvious when it's happening

I'm just not sure that's true -- they lied to us about various covid related facts because they thought it was Very Important That People Do As They Are Told; thing is, they think that about the flu and HPV too. Was covid an aberration, or a removal of masks? I don't really know, but am pretty skeptical of any recommendations based on unverifiable statistical data as opposed to a clear and present benefit case. (Both I and my kids have the usual childhood vaccinations BTW, and I should probably get a tetanus booster at some point -- I'm not anti-vax per se, but I'm not a sucker either.)

Their isn't any credible debate

Again, the problem is we were also told this about many things during COVID that clearly had legitimate credible debate! You are arguing over benefits to the commons, while not realizing the commons was torched by public health on several different occasions during COVID because they got too caught up in #currentthing to think about what they were doing or approach things with any sort of introspection or understanding of past pandemic response policy.

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