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Is It a Human Rights Issue to Refuse the COVID-19 Vaccine Without Repercussions?
Related: antibody dependent enhancement, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, risk assessment, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus, vaccination
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
There is talk of a “vaccine passport” being bandied about. Big tech companies are gettting involved. But where is the ethical/moral argument that should be a prerequisite to such an idea? And by which system of morality can this be justified? Because there isn’t just one philosophical system: we have collectivist ideology versus the individual rights on which this country was founded.
By refusing to take a COVID vaccine, one might become a 2nd-class citizen, deprived of the right to participate in the public sphere in various ways. That includes airlines and public transportation. It could move on to employment and other areas. And who is to say it might not end up at Walmart?
A world where the government can de facto take control of your own body, that is, coerce you into taking a vaccine or anything else seems dystopian . It should concern anyone who cares about individual rights. You should not have to rely upon a religious exemption, as if a reason based on dogma were a better reason than legitimate intellectual and personal-situation concerns. Nor should a doctor get to decide on your behalf.
Seat-of-the-pants science on the new vaccines
It is not “science” to call something safe when no data exists. The fact is that all the advice we are getting is based on the logical fallacy “absence of proof is proof of absence” when it comes to side effects. If side effects are hardly tracked, we basically don’t and cannot know.
Assumptions based on “no data” clearly fall into the potential-harm category. Is doing risk assessment based on best guesses (“no data”) consistent with medical ethics of “first do no harm”? And if one is doing risk assessment, by what metric (or ethics) does it make any sense to vaccinate very low risk people?
The whole COVID vaccine thing seems to be a rush-to-judgment, scientifically speaking. Which isn’t science.
As someone with an auto-immune disease (Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis), my concerns about experimental COVID vaccines cannot be assuaged when I see that the FDA won’t even be tracking side effects and that only a small fraction of adverse events are reported.
Worse, the new vaccines are based on mRNA and are thus could be said to be unprecedented in their unknown risk profiles when used for hundreds of millions of people of varying genetic backgrounds, immunostatus, sex and pregnancy,etc. The WHO acknowledges that last group explicitly, and uses circular reasoning in allowing other unknown groups. There are dozens of “no data” blank spots in the knowledge about the vaccines for dozens of subgroups.
Most concerning issues: ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement), neurological issues
Neurological issues have a well documented history of popping up with various vaccines. And this is already happening with COVID vaccines and happened in trials as well. It seems to be low incidence, but what are the 106 permanent disabilities so far referring to, exactly?
Then there is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)—severe reponse to in-the-wild COVID for vaccinated persons. This phenomenon is well documented in the literature for other vaccines, killing many hapless vaccinated people. When I see“studies” that seem to be mainly opinions on what “should” happen, I don’t feel better about it—I want to see scientific data, non theoretical opinions.
We cannot rule out a virus mutation that would turn neutralizing antibodies into non-neutralizing antibodies, possibly after tens of millions are vaccinated. Low odds on that presumably, but the consequences could be catastrophic. Has that been fed into a risk assessment model?
* All COVID vaccines are experimental aka “investigatory” as of early 2021. This is why they required special use authorization.
