The FDA kills far more people than vaccines do
The Washington Post reports:
The nation’s top vaccine regulator on Friday laid out a stricter approach for federal vaccine approvals, citing his team’s conclusion that coronavirus vaccines had contributed to the deaths of at least 10 children, according to an internal Food and Drug Administration email obtained by The Washington Post…
“This is a profound revelation,” Prasad wrote. “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”
It’s horrifying that the nation’s top vaccine regulator could be so morally obtuse. A central theme of my work on pandemic ethics was the widely-neglected truism that it’s not enough to identify a cost of a medical or policy intervention. You have to compare this to the costs of enforced passivity. How many thousands of people were saved by COVID-19 vaccines who otherwise would have died? How many were killed by being forced to wait for FDA approval before they were allowed to even try a potentially life-saving vaccine in the midst of a lethal pandemic?
Vaccines are among the greatest marvels of modern medicine. We should be reforming our archaic regulatory institutions to make these life-saving interventions more accessible rather than less so.[1] I don’t see how any minimally reasonable and decent person could seriously dispute this, even granting that vaccines—like charitable donations—sometimes kill people.
One of the biggest moral mistakes that shapes society today—as should be agreed by consequentialists and principled deontologists alike—is the failure to appreciate the significance of status quo costs. Deaths resulting from a novel course of action are not inherently worse than deaths resulting from familiar behaviors, but stupid people struggle to appreciate this. They also fail to notice that forcibly preventing individuals from taking novel actions is a form of coercive interference. If an individual dies as a result of being prevented from taking a life-saving action, the coercive interference constitutes killing them—no less than if you paralyzed their lungs, or prevented them from accessing food and water. So even if you believe in some kind of doing/allowing (or killing / letting die) distinction, this does not make the federal government’s vaccine obstructionism easier to justify, but harder.
Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others. Stupidity—even just in the form of status quo bias—kills a lot more people than vaccines do.
- ^
At the user’s discretion, that is (ideally in dialogue with their doctor): I certainly don’t think anyone should be forced to take experimental vaccines!
There’s not much to disagree with here, but I downvoted this anyway because it feels uncomfortably close to in-group cheerleading.
I think if some people are importantly right about something big, and others (esp. with more power) are importantly wrong, it’s worth cheerleading getting things right even if it happens to correlate with your in-group!
I wonder if the crux here is the effectiveness of your particular call to action: “Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others.”
I am guessing I am a pretty typical ea-forum reader in that I am appalled by the anti-vaccine turn of the u.s. government. I cannot do much to “be less stupid” by your lights in this particular respect because I generally agree with you on the immorality of preventing vaccine access. But I also don’t think calling out the stupidity when I see it is necessarily a good strategy. That could be very alienating, reduce trust, make anti-vaccine advocates feel victimized, inadvertently associate my various controversial views with vaccines, and increase backlash in the form of more anti-vaccine advocacy. I’m surr in some instances it is in fact the exactly right thing to do, but I also don’t think it’s the straightforward correct response towards people who genuinely think that vaccines cause autism, death, or other harms.
Quick clarification: My target here is not so much people with radically different empirical beliefs (such that they regard vaccines as net-negative), but rather the particular form of status quo bias that I discuss in the original post.
My guess is that for relatively elite audiences (like those who read philosophy blogs), they’re unlikely to feel attached to this status quo bias as part of their identity, but their default patterns of thought may lead them to (accidentally, as it were) give it more weight than it deserves. So a bit of heated rhetoric and stigmatization of the thought-pattern in question may help to better inoculate them against it.
(Just a guess though — I could be wrong!)