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Stargazer5781 t1_j6t5hjf wrote

Reply to comment by Mckay001 in How to be a sceptic | We have an ethical responsibility to adopt a sceptical attitude to everything from philosophy and science to economics and history in the pursuit of a good life for ourselves and others. by IAI_Admin

This is best achieved by using more precise criticisms. Calling people with legitimate objections to a vaccine anti-vaxxers serves only pharrnaceutical corporate interests, and that behavior has gotten super popular of late. Medical interventions should have clinical trial evidence of benefit exceeding cost in the demographic cohort for which it is recommended, and exceptions should always be permitted depending on the medical needs of the patient.

This was the norm for decades of public health regulation and was a completely uncontroversial position until extremely recently.

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cwk84 t1_j6tgnri wrote

I’ve talked to serval anti vaxxers in person and have used logic and explained statistics and they still didn’t want to let go of the conspiracies.

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[deleted] t1_j6ujapn wrote

Are these people against vaccination for all conditions or just Covid? These are two distinct groups

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SPammingisGood t1_j6th39a wrote

And that's the problem. They don't want to take part in actual scientific/rational discussion. Many are only driven by emotions not by rational objections.

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Couch-Dogo t1_j6w7354 wrote

What do you think happens when a new vaccine is created? They go through hundreds of tests and trials before they’re ever made available to the public. This goes for all medical inventions. It’s fine to be skeptical of something new but people have to learn where to draw the line. If there are hundreds of studies and a mountains of proof saying that vaccines are safe and your still skeptical, that’s just being an idiot.

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Stargazer5781 t1_j6wmivj wrote

So a few things.

First, "vaccines are safe." In saying this, are you saying that every single vaccine ever created has been approved by regulators and is presently in use? Have you taken any of the HIV vaccines for example? J&J's? Merck's? Are you saying that every single one of those failed vaccines that did not pass clinical trial muster is safe?

Obviously not. So you're saying that every single vaccine that has ever been approved has been completely safe? So you would, in good conscience, tell a pre-menopausal woman that she ought to take one of the adenovirus vector vaccines for COVID? And that there's absolutely no risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia? And more generally, there's never been a Class I or Class II recall of a vaccine in history? Wow, what a revelation! I am so delighted to discover they were all false!

In terms of our present situation of COVID vaccines, my main objections concern the following:

  • Requiring college-aged students to be vaccinated and boosted with mRNA vaccines when they are the cohort most at risk for myocarditis and least at risk from the disease.

  • Adding the COVID vaccines to the infant vaccine schedule when it is still under the auspices of emergency use authorization. If it's to be added to a schedule, it should pass the FDA's normal rigorous testing requirements.

  • Approving the bivalent booster when the only evidence supporting said approval was the generation of antibodies in 8 mice. The mass distribution of any medical product should at least require safety testing and preferably require efficacy testing as well with clinically beneficial endpoints, not the mere validation of a surrogate endpoint.

There are many more objections, but these are the most egregious ones that would have been considered ludicrous even three years ago. And this insanity is not global by the way. In Denmark, for example, the same practice mandated on our college campuses is banned due to the serious, if rare, side-effects among young men. It's also worth noting that the heads of the vaccine division of the FDA, Gruber and Krause, resigned in protest over this issue. Were they being idiots?

There is serious cause for concern here, and I would encourage you to reflect on why you're so certain there is not. I am not particularly worried about vaccines that went through the FDA's rigorous testing and requirements in years past. I am concerned about how our public health apparatus has changed for the worse.

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