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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

The important sentence:

> Despite rare cases of myocarditis, the benefit-risk assessment for COVID-19 vaccination shows a favorable balance for all age and sex groups; therefore, COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for everyone ≥12 years of age.

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Let's put this another relatable way.

Despite rare cases of aircraft disasters, the benefit-risk assessment for air travel shows a favourable balance for all age and sex groups; therefore, air travel is recommended for everyone ≥12 years of age

When this comes to travel by car/road, the risk just shoots up many fold, yet nobody bats an eyelid to use cars, sometimes multiple times a day.

Right, but if we had an injection which fixed the car death rate, we damn well would take it.

I mean, we _do_; not traveling by car. And yet people who could take a bus/train, or just _walk_, feasibly, often do take a car. The risk of death from any given car journey vs the inconvenience just isn't high enough that this is a significant factor for most people.

(Though, people who take cars where they could walk are missing a trick here; in the long run the risks of this sort of sedentary lifestyle are much more of a risk than that of car accidents.)

If cars killed 800,000 people over the past few years and getting a shot vastly reduced the death people would get that shot without all the irrational resistance this shot has generated.

Except I get to make the risk assessment for myself not someone I've never met.

I won't presume your qualifications, but I'll just state my opinion: the people who are qualified to perform benefit risk assessments are the people writing papers saying that the benefit risk assessment is favourable.

You might be qualified to make that assessment. But you'd be in disagreement with most of your peers.

This statement should give you pause when the FDA has rejected the risk benefit assessments of the qualified advisory committees.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna2074

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/11/17/fda-to-sidestep-advisers...

That was a narrow rejection based on incomplete evidence, as explained in the article. They were relying only on old U.S. data and still believed that the original 2 shots were adequate protection. This was in question at the time and subsequently there’s been a clear consensus that a booster is necessary at least until the original short timing is fixed, and, of course, that was before Omicron greatly increased the risk of exposure.

I don't think that a post-hoc justification is sufficient here. Policy makers didn't have advance knowledge that the scientific experts didn't. It may have worked out in this case, but what about the next? In particular, I am concerned about the risk assessments for the <5 population. Or perhaps the next drug\therapy. Looking abroad, you will also find cases where expert panels found questionable risk/benefit for some groups and were overruled.

Most of what I said was available at the time (not Omicron, of course). The US agencies chose not to take non-US data seriously, similarly to when the CDC acted like Delta would magically stop at the border after it was causing huge problems in the UK & India.

The original 2 shots still provide good protection. Whether that's "adequate" or not is entirely subjective and arbitrary.

I assume this is to peer pressure and other dynamics at this point. The benefit for young people is nearly not quantifiable.

Spoken like a true individual.

Vaccines optimally work if we don't, and instead think as a community.

Surely you must agree that there is some point where individual trumps community benefits?

The hard part is deciding when. It is extremely easy to postulate hypotheticals if utilitarianism has no limitations.

Legally speaking, that isn't true (at least not in the US).

Vaccine mandates (in general, regardless of today's SCOTUS decision) remain constitutional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

In fact, you are perfectly within your rights to elect a state government that requires vaccination for all citizens.

That case is only in reference to state government not federal. No where in the constitution does the federal government receive any kind of power remotely close to that. If my state enacted a mandate, I would move immediately. While I may agree that in some cases that the state has the right to do force one, it would only be in an extremely rare, last resort, literally everyone will die case. The government should always err on the side of liberty.

Yes sure, but you need to factor in the fact that you might be wrong and that the risk of being wrong can be disastrous for you and your family.

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