Can you agree? No government vaccine mandates until pharmaceutical companies become liable

Who says they don't have an interest in making the safest product? This is a competitive market. Didn't you witness the huge race between Pfizer and Moderna to cross the finishing line first? Didn't you see how AstraZeneca and J&J lost terrain because their vaccines had more serious side effects? Of course Pfizer and Moderna did their best to do well because doing well turns into billions... While the market punished AZ and J&J for their less good vaccines.

And are you under the impression that these vaccines are so dangerous???

The anti-vaxxers are rabid and the media loves horror stories, but the Moderna and Pfizer shots are HUGELY safe and efficacious. These are among some of the best vaccines ever made. The rate of serious complications for Moderna and Pfizer is like 0.0008%.

There are COUNTLESS medications that are taken every day by billions of people (if you are of a certain age and you have certain conditions that come with age you're probably taking them too, or if you aren't, you eventually will) that have a MUCH worse safety record than 0.0008%.

Yes, the market does have a say.

A European friend of mine was telling me that people were getting to vaccination centers offering the AZ and the Pfizer and they were saying "this AZ is the one that gives you the blood clots, right? Give me the Pfizer, please." This, despite the AZ indeed having a higher incidence of blood clots, but one that is still much smaller than birth control pils and a simple airplane trip.

"So dangerous"???

What is really dangerous is the SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines have a rate of complications literally thousands of times smaller than what the virus causes.

 

I'm talking about the pre-covid vaccines- the ones that the vaccine manufacturers were going to stop making because they were too much of a financial liability to be profitable. If the govt hadn't bailed them out, I suspect someone would have made an alternative that is less of a liability (read: safer) and therefore profitable.

 

No mandates period!

 

Sign a waiver before you get a vaccine. There's your liability.

All the issues were pointed out before I took the vaccine. So it was my decision.

 

OK, good points, then.

 

In other words people have to sign away their rights, on top of having to be injected with something, or they will be fired from government employment.

I don't know what the point of your argument was here.

 

Well of course. But this is one more big reason not to have a mandate.

Anti-vaxxers definitely shouldn't be willing to budge at all on this issue if the other side isn't willing to eliminate these liability exemptions.

 

If that's really true then why should liability even be an issue then?


Doing a quick calculation, if only 0.0008% users suffered serious complications, and if each of those who suffered serious complications got awarded $1 million on average, then it would cost the company an additional $8 per person.

Is what you're actually saying that there would be much more than 0.0008% of patients who would claim serious complications?
If so, isn't it very possible that 0.0008% figure might not be accurate?

 

You added in the last part.

It's a pandemic. The normal rules of civility make way for the collective good.

 

Evidently the liability protection was there BEFORE post-marketing experience showed such a low rate of complications (not the case for the AstraZeneca, for example, so, these companies couldn't know in advance what the rate would be. The protections are there for the companies to have an interest in R&D, so that they research, develop, make, and distribute vaccines knowing that it won't be ruinous for the company. Functioning Crystal Balls last I checked not being available on Amazon or EBay, no wonder the protections are put in place BEFORE the safety rates are known. Duh!

And yes, that's really true. These vaccines are extremely safe. Of course you anti-vaxxers will come up with bogus and made-up data to disprove it but yes, it's true. VERY low incidence of life-threatening complications (compare this to the virus which has a MUCH bigger incidence of life-threatening complications, both during the acute phase and in relationship to sequelae after recovery).

 

And so now that we supposedly know what the rate is, we can eliminate the liability protections, right?

Your argument there does not seem to argue against that.

 

Nah, these protections are here to stay. They intend to have future impact as well.
If we were to make a vaccine-maker say, "oh, we got the protection but then it got revoked on bases that our vaccine was TOO good, and now we're exposed for the rare reactions even if we are so much safer than everybody else; and given the HUGE numbers of recipients of our fine product, even the rare reactions are numerous enough to come back to bite us!" - how do you think future developers would feel about that? How would they trust a protection that would be subject to revocation??? Duh!
Frankly, I thought you were smarter. You're disappointing me. Try to keep up and tighten it up, will you?

 

That's illogical.

What that is is a different, weaker, type of argument that you seem to be subtly passing off as the same thing as the first argument.

I think we're arguing around in circles now.
Don't the statistics being touted show that those rates are low?

The main argument behind giving them those protections doesn't continue to apply after we know what those rates are, if they seem very low.

Your whole argument seems to be based on the premise that we still don't know the risk of those vaccines, which if that is the case they probably shouldn't be mandated.

Again, you seem to be changing the argument now.

Why would that prevent them from development? Every other industry is subject to legal liability.
If the rates are known and indeed are so low, then they should be able to deal with it just like every other industry.

Please explain what would make the vaccine industry so different then.
(It seems to me your previous arguments would mostly not apply in this situation)

 

Part of the numerator is missing, too. People who've had and transmitted COVID and never knew they did it.

 

Have I ever said anything in favor of mandates? FYI, I'm against mandates. I have posted NUMEROUS times here that I favor catching flies with honey rather than with vinegar, and I favor a strong public announcement campaign to teach people the advantages of vaccines, so that they are protected from the misinformation spouted by anti-vaxxers like you.

And it's not "my argument." It's the law of the land, and it's what applies now. I merely explained to you - who obviously ignore it, either maliciously or from sheer ignorance - WHY it's being done this way.

 

I think if the government stopped lying about COVID every time they opened their mouths, people might trust them more.
But that ship has sailed long before COVID arrived.

COVID is more a political issue to Democrats than a medical issue. Period. As evidenced by the fact many of them are caught not even following their own mandates.

 

Your argument makes some sense if we are developing new vaccines we don't really know much about, but it doesn't make so much sense if we are talking about vaccines that we do know for certain have such low rates of complications, and therefore presumably wouldn't cost the companies too much in liability.

I contended that you were changing the argument. (Maybe you did not realize it)
And that your original argument no longer logically applies.

 

Sigh... again, this is not MY argument. This is the way it's being done, and with good reason.
You are being short-sighed. You think about THIS vaccine. The protections exist for the sake of ALL vaccines, present AND future.
Yes, we got lucky this time. We got fabulous vaccines that are effective (at least, before Delta, but still mostly protective) and very safe.
It's not the case every time.
If we were to have a revocation clause for these protections, penalizing vaccines for being too good, companies wouldn't invest 2 billion dollars developing a vaccine.
I'm changing the argument? What change? I can't change the law. I'm not an elected lawmaker. It is what it is. I'm merely explaining to you why it's done this way.
Your silly ideas got dismantled by facts and reality.
You are clinging to them and trying to make of this, some sort of argument between you and me.
You have a problem with that? Address your lawmaking representative. I didn't make the laws and regulations.
You're repeating yourself.
I'm rapidly losing interest.
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PS - LOL, you said the argument makes "some" sense if we're developing new vaccines we don't know much about... that's precisely the case. Did you know that before Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, NO mRNA vaccines had ever been made for human consumption and had never been brought to the market?

Yeah, the companies knew little about what to expect. So, they needed liability protections to venture there. We gave them the protections, they dared to go full speed, and we ended up with fabulous, efficacious, and safe vaccines. A win-win that only anti-vaxxers like you can't celebrate.

 

I was pointing out about how the arguments you previously stated do not apply. Why would they at that point?
Do you see? It becomes a different argument.

I think you may be engaging in a logical equivocation fallacy, where you are conflating together two different arguments.

To clarify, I understand how your argument applies at the beginning, when the vaccine is still new, but not after it is known what the complication rates are.

When the vaccine is new companies do not want to invest in something with unknown risk. But when the risk is then known, then that specific argument no longer applies, correct?

Does that make sense? Are you able to understand what I'm talking about?

 

Yeah, I'm perfectly able to understand what you are saying; do you think I'm dumb or unsophisticated? LOL.
But what you are saying is not how the real world functions.
Sure, the protections made more sense before we knew how spectacular the mRNA vaccines would turn out to be.
But you simply DON'T change the rules of the game half-time, or else, future companies will say, "Oh well, let's not get into this market because we can't trust the protections, they can revoke them anytime."
It's pretty simple. It's crystalline. Why in the hell are YOU struggling to understand it???

 

If they could do it with the eviction moratorium, why can't they do it here?


Look, I sort of see what you're saying. But maybe the policy should be changed so the government only guarantees an exemption for a finite period of time.
Or if the company makes some special agreement or contract with the government, where the government can later revoke those special liability exemptions if the company is paid a certain amount of money to compensate them for their investment in development. That definitely would not be unreasonable here, since the government is almost the sole buyer of all these vaccines right now. It was a really special circumstance under which they developed this vaccine, involving a deal with the government.

Since the government is almost the only buyer right now, I don't see how it would be that unreasonable to alter the terms of the deal. Government already pretty much controls the terms of the deal in pricing. Why would it be so different to do so with liability?

 

You want to talk about "terms of the deal", we could also talk about college students that paid tuition at their school, not expecting that they would be required to get vaccinated to be able to complete their schooling and get their diploma.
Seems unfair to change the terms on them.

 

Government controls the terms of the deal in pricing?
Pfizer and Moderna have just increased the fees for European Union countries.
There is a competitive market out there.
Pfizer secured a 2-billion deal with the US government even BEFORE their vaccine succeeded.
I'd say the companies are on the driving seat. If the US government doesn't buy their vaccines, there are another 209 countries out there who would die for them. It's a seller's market.

Still, I don't see why you are trying to make it so complicated.

Why exactly are you proposing this complicated temporary protections plus some sort of lump sum for future lawsuits?

Uncertainty and changed rules are not a business-friendly environment. I though that you conservatives (if you're one) knew that.

So, you want temporary protections...for vaccines that are probably here to stay for the duration, since this virus is clearly becoming endemic and boosters are already authorized by the UK, Germany, France, Israel, and now the United States. All countries will follow,; mark my words. This will be a permanent market with annual or bi-annual shots. Why would the companies settle for only temporary protections?

 

What the hell are you talking about? All colleges and universities ALREADY require students to show proof of VARIOUS vaccinations, and it's always been like this. Do you have kids? I do. When my kids got to college I had to dig out their vaccine records to show to the school, or else they wouldn't be allowed to enroll, What is changed? Almost nothing. It's just that there is a novel contagious disease, and the schools are ADDING the vaccine against it, to all the other vaccines they already require. Where was the outcry when they wanted DPT vaccines, etc.? Why wasn't this ever an issue before???

I'll tell you why: because schools requiring various vaccinations like they've always done, wasn't a political hot potato. Given that Covid-19 became RIDICULOUSLY politicized (first time I see something like this in my 41 years of exercise of medicine!), now OH MY GOD THE SKY IS FALLING THE SCHOOLS WANT THE POOR KIDS TO GET COVID-19 VACCINES HOW EVIL!!!

It's all profoundly ridiculous. Given that the schools in order to operate and be commercially viable, can't afford outbreak after outbreak and shutdown after shutdown, they are ENTIRELY justified, as for the most part private businesses that they are, to set the rules and set the conditions for students to attend.

Again, I thought that conservatives wanted private enterprises to be free to set their own rules???

 

That's irrelevant to this particular argument.
We're talking specifically about liability in the US.

(Okay, it gets kind of complicated, but maybe the US could still agree to keep the liability exception when it came to foreign countries, and agree not to get involved there)

Again, you seem to be changing the argument.

Some believe this vaccine is a little bit different than previous vaccines.