Take a step away from Covid and ask the general question: why are vaccines safe and effective? There are two different kinds of answer, the medical, and the sociological.
First we need to split the concept of a vaccine into vaccine candidates, the drugs that get submitted to the FDA, and approved vaccines, the lucky few that make it through the Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT). Many vaccine candidates are not safe and effect. They fail in trials and only specialists ever hear of them. But some pass, and become in time approved vaccines.
But why do any pass? There is a medical story about the human immune system. It is rather powerful. There is a lot for vaccine makers to work with, poking it to generate an immune response.
This gives us a simple story to tell about why approved vaccines are safe and effective. Understand it as a choice rather than a fact. The safety and efficacy are tested in, because we choose to discard the failing candidates.
But maybe that sociological story isn't so simple. Why make that choice? There is a lot of money to be made selling vaccines, why let bad trial results harm profits?
The answer is that the truth tends to come out. There are not just anti-vaxers, refusing all vaccines, there are the cautious, waiting to see what [The Cochrane Collaboration](www.cochrane.org) have to say about the quality of the trials. If the unvaccinated aren't falling ill, that will raise eyebrows. If the vaccinated are having assorted health problems at higher rates than the unvaccinated, that will cause concern. Best to let bad trial results harm profits and avoid a shit storm.
But wait! Why not just mandate the vaccine. If everybody is vaccinated, one can explain away people still catching the disease by saying that it would be worse if they were unvaccinated. Provided the mandate is strictly enforced, no-one will know. And if people get blood clots, well, people are always getting blood clots, it is only a problem if there are unvaccinated people getting them at a noticeably lower rate. (Rare kinds of blood clots, with a very low base rate, might be awkward, but will probably be rare enough to be shrugged off.) Mandating vaccination has the power to stop bad trial results hurting profits and the power to stop the truth coming out.
The sociological side of why vaccines are safe and effective has complications that play out on a longer time scale. Once we start mandating vaccines, we initiate a count down. It is just a matter of time before the choice to discard failing candidates becomes the fussy, old-fashioned, unprofitable way of doing things. In time, the modern way will be to pay the bribes necessary to get both approval and a mandate. With a mandate, the truth is mostly suppressed and the for-profit media will hide the residual for a suitable fee.
It is common to judge a mandate for a particular vaccine by addressing the question of whether that particular vaccine is safe and effective. That is valid in the narrowly medical perspective, but is open to the objection that it is short-term thinking. The sociological perspective is also important, and has longer term dynamics. We should reject mandates for safe and effective vaccines because we look ahead and want a world in which approved vaccines continue to be safe and effective.
[–]raven9 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun - (0 children)
[–]Antarchomachus 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun - (0 children)
[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun - (0 children)
[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun - (0 children)