I think it's notable that there is substantial resistance to vaccines even among health care workers. https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021062...
> "I want to see more testing done," she says. "It took a long time to get a flu vaccine, and we made a COVID vaccine in 6 months. I want to know, before I start putting something into my body, that the testing is done."
> Many of her co-workers share her feelings, she said.
Would have been nice if the article included responses to these concerns. Plenty of shaming about how dangerous passing covid to patients can be, but I didn't see anything that actually addresses the confidence problem.
edit:
Looks like a different hospital worked on the confidence problem with some success:
> "There was a lot of hesitancy and skepticism," says William Schaffner, MD, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. So the infectious disease division put together a multifaceted program including Q&As, educational sessions, and one-on-one visits with employees, "from the custodians all the way up to the C-suite," he says.
Today, HHS data shows the hospital is 83% vaccinated. Schaffner thinks the true number is probably higher, about 90%. "We're very pleased with that," he says.
Here's one simple question: who's liable for the damages/complications from the vaccine.
The answer: it's complicated.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
https://fortune.com/2021/04/07/covid-vaccine-safety-is-astra...
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-are-pharmaceutical-compa...
But why should it be? If you trust your product, that's a no-brainer to cover the consumer for damages. If you don't...
This assumes a lot of things about the US legal system that aren't really true. A company can get sued for anything. And the cost of litigation is nontrivial. In the US, by default, each party is liable for their own litigation costs. This means that if 20000 people decide to sue Pfizer (you know, 1% of 1% of the vaccinated in the US), Pfizer now has to deal with the litigation costs of tens of thousands of lawsuits. Even if they win every single one, they're paying for hundreds, or even thousands, of lawyer-years in billables.
And while many of those might just be people hoping for a quick buck, or people with legitimate concerns who are ultimately mistaken, some will be agenda-driven people with funding to make the cases last, and whose goal is to make Pfizer look bad, because those people think vaccines are dangerous and the people who make them should be punished.
And Pfizer is on the hook for all of that even if there are no damages. Zero, zilch.
They can recover those costs if the lawsuit is frivolous. And we're talking about a billion dollar company racking billions in profits fighting in court against... sick people robbed of their health's. A balanced fight indeed.
No, in this hypothetical, we're presuming that the vaccine has no side effects. So these people aren't sick people robbed of their health, but either mistaken or agenda driven.
> They can recover those costs if the lawsuit is frivolous.
This is a high bar and isn't always even possible, depending on the jurisdiction. Often it requires things like the person filing the suit to know the suit is frivolous.
Among physicians and medical researchers with PhDs, though, you'll find very little resistance to vaccines.
[1] https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/ [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102797
This isn't to knock those concerns. But while neither an MD, an LPN, or a layperson is an epidemiologist, we should be exalting the opinions of them by virtue of their authority. Not because you _need_ to be an epidemiologist to have a valid opinion, but because the above buys you no more merit, in and of itself.
Whether or not medical consensus has been more predictive than a coin flip historically is an empirical claim. I have no idea if it's true, but that seems doubtful. It's particularly interesting to cite penicillin as an example of medical authorities being wrong. Child mortality has dropped more than a hundredfold in the United States since the invention of penicillin. Not that penicillin is solely responsible for that, but I have to question whether possibly negative developmental effects you are trying to cite here really offsets the negative effects of children having potentially deadly infections. I had a severe case of pneumonia when I was 5 and would have died if not for antibiotics. Death is surely the worst possible negative developmental effect.
And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.
Then so was the comment it was responding to
So here, the poster asserts that they find it notable, as in worthy of remark, that within the domain of healthcare people are opting out. The poster does not make any conjecture or assertions aside from that, the poster does not lean on any position nor support one from the authority of the "healthcare worker" mosaic. Instead, the poster very simply states that it is remarkable that that cohort chooses to remain unvaccinated without any further context.
The proceeding post moves to make assertions and stratify the cohort into classes, and implicitly posits the superior decisionmaking of the educated, arguing at what is in actuality a phantasm, as the parent did not postulate anything whatever. I suspect he projected some archetype onto the parent, hazarded induction, and argued with an appeal to authority in an attempt to make a point that needn't be asserted in the context.
I have real work to do.
This thread was about people perceiving a new vaccine, as one not tested enough.
This is vastly different from someone which has resistance to vaccination overall.
I am quite concerned that such mislabelling of people, could lead to disaster.
We shouldn't treat the opinions of a CNA who might have had as few as 85 hours of education as "the opinions of a medical professional" - -that- is entirely valid. Their opinions can be credible, and they can have valid concerns, but they're not held higher because they have a cert or license or degree.