We’re publishing an original piece on the Daily Sceptic by a senior executive in a pharmaceutical company about why penalising those who haven’t had a Covid vaccine is contrary to the principle of informed consent. Here is an extract:
Unlike the benefit, the safety risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations are not age dependent and include rare, serious adverse events including death. So, the balance of benefit and risk for their use also varies with age and is vastly different for a diabetic man in his 60s compared to a healthy young woman in her 20s. From the perspective of the benefit to the individual, there is therefore no way we should be considering vaccinating healthy young people using these vaccines. The likelihood of serious adverse effects may be small but then so is the likelihood of avoiding serious COVID-19 and so there is a very real possibility that a mass vaccination campaign of young people will produce more harm than benefit. In fact, the original strategy was to focus COVID-19 vaccinations on the over-50s for precisely this benefit/risk reason.
But somewhere along the way, COVID-19 vaccinations stopped being solely about the benefit to the individual and started to be about the benefit to society (i.e., the goal of achieving herd immunity). A brief reminder: herd immunity occurs when a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to a given pathogen in such a way that the likelihood of encountering an infectious person drops, as does the likelihood of an infectious person being able to pass the infection on to another individual who also becomes infectious. As a result, herd immunity protects individuals who are naïve to an infection simply because they are unlikely to ever encounter an infectious person and at the same time it means that an infection can no longer spread effectively through the population and may even die out.
Vaccinations can produce herd immunity and in the case of smallpox were so effective that they led to the elimination of the disease itself. But from an informed consent perspective there is one huge difference between vaccination campaigns that have historically produced herd immunity and that being pursued for COVID-19 and that is that historically the diseases concerned were of significant risk to those receiving the vaccination. For example, measles is a significant risk for young children and so we vaccinate young children. But young children often grow up to be adults and carry their measles immunity with them and so, as a result, measles herd immunity emerges as a consequence of measles vaccination… it is absolutely not its aim.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: For a diametrically opposite view, see this piece in Salon: “It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated – they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms.”
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