IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
Lots of societies who started with some killing “for the common good” ended in atrocities.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
[−]InsideOutSanta · 2026-07-02 Thu 05:35 UTC ·
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Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"?
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
[−]InsideOutSanta · 2026-07-02 Thu 07:27 UTC ·
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> how your government mandates you to remain in that country
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
[−]cryptoegorophy · 2026-07-02 Thu 05:20 UTC ·
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I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice.
[−]throwaway5752 · 2026-07-02 Thu 03:03 UTC ·
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This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%.
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish pricks that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish pricks was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
> They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
[−]BoingBoomTschak · 2026-07-02 Thu 06:40 UTC ·
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>Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing.
The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
> However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
This argument also applies to you: by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
> That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
The problem isn't me owning a car and gun, the problem is obviously everybody else. I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
Arguably so was the risk from the vaccine.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish pricks that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish pricks was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics.
There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
This is easy to prove. Simply find a high school biology textbook printed before Covid.
And that is exactly what was promissed to me.
You are just full of it, that is it.