“It is that they preserve health system capacity and decrease collective social costs by significantly reducing rates of hospitalization and serious illness.”
What is the limiting principle with this rationale? Mandates for influenza vaccines? How about pneumococcal vaccines for the elderly? Mandatory suboxone therapy for opioid addicts? …
“It is that they preserve health system capacity and decrease collective social costs by significantly reducing rates of hospitalization and serious illness.”
What is the limiting principle with this rationale? Mandates for influenza vaccines? How about pneumococcal vaccines for the elderly? Mandatory suboxone therapy for opioid addicts? Or, reductio ad absurdum, mandatory gastric bypass surgery for those with a BMI over 40.
At least with those examples we have longitudinal safety data.
There is no single limiting principle. These types of public health decisions are based by weighing the expected social and individual benefits against individual costs. The other interventions you list are either much more costly to individuals (gastric bypass surgery) or offer less benefit to individuals (SARS-Cov2 is much deadlier than influenza and the vaccine is far more effective). The pneumococcal vaccine is a more interesting edge case, but on a societal level CAP hospitalizations are much less costly than COVID-19 hospitalizations.
And again, 'mandate' does not mean 'forcibly inject you.' It means 'assess a financial penalty on your taxes for incurring a higher expected healthcare utilization cost on society.'
And if your concern is longitudinal safety data, I'd be curious for you to outline the exact nature of novel adverse events you are expecting to emerge in the 12+ months after global distribution of the vaccines. We've already detected and characterized adverse effects (myocarditis) with a ~1:100,000 population level signal (obviously higher in the at-risk cohort). It is theoretically possible that late onset adverse effects could emerge...but they would be the first such late onset effects to ever be observed from a vaccination series, and I struggle to imagine a biologically plausible mechanism that could account for such an event. At some point, the tiny, tiny risks associated with the marginal uncertainty are outweighed by the known benefits - and the marginal uncertainty shrinks with every passing week.
“It is that they preserve health system capacity and decrease collective social costs by significantly reducing rates of hospitalization and serious illness.”
What is the limiting principle with this rationale? Mandates for influenza vaccines? How about pneumococcal vaccines for the elderly? Mandatory suboxone therapy for opioid addicts? Or, reductio ad absurdum, mandatory gastric bypass surgery for those with a BMI over 40.
At least with those examples we have longitudinal safety data.
There is no single limiting principle. These types of public health decisions are based by weighing the expected social and individual benefits against individual costs. The other interventions you list are either much more costly to individuals (gastric bypass surgery) or offer less benefit to individuals (SARS-Cov2 is much deadlier than influenza and the vaccine is far more effective). The pneumococcal vaccine is a more interesting edge case, but on a societal level CAP hospitalizations are much less costly than COVID-19 hospitalizations.
And again, 'mandate' does not mean 'forcibly inject you.' It means 'assess a financial penalty on your taxes for incurring a higher expected healthcare utilization cost on society.'
And if your concern is longitudinal safety data, I'd be curious for you to outline the exact nature of novel adverse events you are expecting to emerge in the 12+ months after global distribution of the vaccines. We've already detected and characterized adverse effects (myocarditis) with a ~1:100,000 population level signal (obviously higher in the at-risk cohort). It is theoretically possible that late onset adverse effects could emerge...but they would be the first such late onset effects to ever be observed from a vaccination series, and I struggle to imagine a biologically plausible mechanism that could account for such an event. At some point, the tiny, tiny risks associated with the marginal uncertainty are outweighed by the known benefits - and the marginal uncertainty shrinks with every passing week.