The Brussels Times reports,
Coronavirus: Belgian experts ‘shocked’ as AstraZeneca seeks liability waiver for vaccine
A pharmaceutical firm developing a coronavirus vaccine of which Belgium has already secured millions of doses has made the “exceptional” request to not be held liable for any potential side effects.
As it enters the final stages of human trials in the development of a vaccine against the new coronavirus, drugmaker AstraZeneca has introduced several requests to be protected from future claims of liability.
The request was received with surprise by some observers in Belgium, with, health and medical law experts in Belgium referring to it as exceptional or even shocking.
Professor Thierry Vansweevelt is one of those most shocked.
“There is a European directive on product liability,” Vansweevelt said. “Any producer who places a defective product on the market is responsible for that without exceptions. You can’t escape that.”
For the sake of the people of Belgium, a country of which I am fond, I rather hope they can escape it. It is telling that even its supporters see this directive as something that people might want to escape.
I saw this story on Reddit UK politics. It is usually a bit of a left wing hive mind, so I was relieved to see that the highest-recommended comment was by someone going by the name “LiteralTory” who said,
I’m shocked he’s shocked. Developed under incredible pressure and speed. A novel mechanism of action compared to other vaccines. Going to be given to literally billions of people within months of release. Even extremely rare side effects could be numerous enough to destroy the company. And with no vaccine, who bears the risk? Governments, populations and economies. I can entirely see why in this instance they’d expect governments and populations to accept a certain share of the risk.
Does this professor have no imagination not to be able to see that?
Where does imagination come into it? The premise that the professor starts with would be something like ‘The EU is benevolent and good, its Regulations supreme law, encapsulating unwavering truth and right. How could it be otherwise?‘. This is, ultimately for him, a value judgement, so reason doesn’t come into it, any more than you could reason with me to say that beer is bad.
From that he would logically proceed to say that anything that conflicts with his ‘Prime Directive’ has to yield to the supremacy of EU law. To provide for an exemption would (i) be difficult at such short notice and (ii) imply that the EU got it wrong.
And if they get sued to buggery, well, that’s the law, and they are disposable, it’s very communitaire to take one for the team. The Common Good before the Individual Good you know.
It’s still based on the huge assumption thhatna vaccine is required.
Cost / benefit and all that.
Many countries are coping admirably without any vaccine.
https://c19study.com/
Strict liability as applied to prescription drugs has always been a muddle. After the original (US) formulation of the doctrine, it was altered and amended by a series of “comments” made in the Restatements (a sort of leading authoritative guide to using and interpreting statutory law.)
One of those comments specifically applied to prescription drugs – Comment K to Restatement 402A:
That was the state of the law back in the early ’90’s here. Since then, various jurisdictions have adopted this reasoning, and some have not. Depends on the strength of the plaintiff bar in the political landscape, I suspect.
End result is, if they make it properly (in a manufacturing sense), and disclose warnings, the fact that it might cause harm simply through its known properties ought to relieve the maker of strict liability.
Oh, heck. Careless.
Change ” . . . a sort of leading authoritative guide to using and interpreting statutory law . . . ” to “. . . a sort of leading authoritative guide to using and interpreting tort law.”
The US is subject to the The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) which establishes what is known as vaccine court where only actual damages must be proved in a civil proceeding and there is no jury. This was amended by the Homeland Security act to immunize [ha] smallpox vaccines in case of some terrorist bio-attack. Perhaps the Wuhan virus could be considered a bio-terrorism event and provisions made accordingly. As for the EU, maybe the people can buy their vaccines on the black market.
The answer is simple – NEITHER.
The way American Tort law has changed (“evolved” – as if no conscious human decisions were involved which-they-were) “strict liability” has come to mean “you pay lots of money – even if what happened was NOT your fault”.
For example, the Democrats (including Puppet Biden) want both the sellers of firearms and the makers of firearms” to be “strictly liable” for any harm done in the future by those firearms. This is a backdoor way of getting of the 2nd Amendment.
Liability should only apply if negligence can be shown – NOT on the basis of “you have money – give it to us or else!”
As for a “vaccine” for Covid 19 – the post rather gives the way by not saying “a vaccine for covid 19” but rather “a coronavirus vaccine” there are many coronaviruses – and the “tests” often do not tell them apart (yes you may be dragged off to a detention camp when you DO NOT have Covid 19 – just as if you are run over by a truck or die of a gun shot wound you may be still be registered as a “Covid death” in some parts of the world – including many American States). As corona viruses often mutate this “vaccine” scam can go on and on.
And it is a scam – as the Belarus protests prove. The world media are all supporting the protests – where are the masks (a handful of masks in crowds of thousands of people), where is the “Social Distancing”.
If the international establishment were sincere they would be panic stricken about ending the Belarus protests – instead they SUPPORT them. So the insincerity of the media and the rest of the establishment is obvious.
This does NOT mean the vaccine is unimportant – on the contrary, like the marks, it will be a sign of SUBMISSION TO THE NARRATIVE.
Hopefully the vaccine will do no serious medical harm (Mr “Bill” Gates would love it to sterilise people or alter their genetic make up – but I do NOT think this lunatic will get his way, at least not this time), but it is not intended to “save lives” – it is intended as a political and cultural statement. Mr Putin is having people injected with his vaccine already – and the West will do so under “President Biden”, and the motive (in both cases) will be nothing whatever to do with “saving lives”.
Part of the “Great Reset” of “Sustainable Development” which far from being a “conspiracy theory” is openly discussed by the international elite – the next major conference on it will be a Davos next year.
The totalitarian agenda was mapped out long BEFORE Covid 19 – “public health” is an EXCUSE for.
Many people have suggested that the international elite created Covid 19 on purpose – but I doubt that. After all if the World Health Organisation and the various governments and “Woke” Corporations (who see the Chinese “Social Credit” system as the model for the world) were creating a virus – why not a more effective one?
After all if people really were dropping dead in the streets then opposition to Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030 (“Sustainable Development” – totalitarianism) would collapse, and there would be need for the endless propaganda that they have needed to making people terrified of Covid 19. Also Covid 19 is treatable (if caught early) and even the media (who are fanatically determined, at least in the United States, to cover up the treatment – so they can INCREASE casualties) can not cover that up for ever, cracks in the “narrative” are already visible.
It is true that there was a massive United Nations event in WUHAN at the start of this – a massive celebration of “solidarity” (a word the international elite use when they mean TYRANNY) and this helped spread the virus around the world.
But I still think that the virus was released from the lab near Wuhan (the lab that Dr Fauci loves so much) by ACCIDENT.
There are such things as coincidences.
The international elite were waiting for an EXCUSE – and they just grabbed this excuse when it came along.
Chris is quite correct about American vaccine law – it is one of the areas (another being firearms) where the insanity of “strict liability” does NOT apply.
After all Dr Fauci (who has been in control of this part the government since the 1980s – using the AIDS hysteria to gain unelected power and keep it for so many decades) and his Corporate chums, would not want the concept of “Deep Pockets” in this area – as they have the Deep Pockets.
As for Europeans buying the vaccine on the “Black Market”.
Oh Chris – you are touchingly innocent.
No one will be buying the vaccine for themselves – it will be shoved in us whether we want it or not.
And “saving lives” is most certainly not what this is about.
Of course the Professor is also touchingly innocent.
We know from the “laws” around the European Central Bank, laws expressly written to PREVENT it doing the very things it does every day, that the concept of “European Law” has no fixed meaning.
What the “laws” say is irrelevant – what matters is what the establishment (including the unelected judges) want.
The American Constitution is now much the same – people such as Chief Justice Roberts (not to be confused with “Dread Pirate Roberts” from the “Princess Bride”) could not give a toss what the United States Constitution says – they rule in the interests of the establishment.
Do not like judges ignoring the law and the Constitution?
Then vote them out – except you can not do so, as they not up for regular contested reelection.
Then appeal to the jury – except there is no jury (not in the American case or the European Union case).
So we can forget about “European Law” as when it is not in the interests of the establishment elite, it does not exist. Neither does the Constitution of the United States – ask Dread Pirate Roberts and his gang of Merry Cut Throats on the Supreme Court.
I think we can all agree it is not worth discussing the “British law” – as both the law of England and Wales, Scots Law, and the law of Northern Ireland are just what the totalitarian “liberal” elite say they are.
Common Law in these islands has always defined marriage as between a husband and wife – a man and a woman, but Common Law is killed by Statute.
In the case of abortion in Northern Ireland no Statue was needed – a judge got up one morning and decided, in defiance of both Common Law and Statue Law in Northern Ireland, that killing babies was fun – and that was that.
In the old sense of “fixed rules that limit the powerful” there IS NO LAW in these islands. The will of the powerful is the “law” here – Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Sir William Blackstone, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham have WON.
Sir Edward Coke, John Locke, Sir John Holt, Thomas Reid and Edmund Burke have LOST.
The idea that “the law” will limit what the powerful can do to us with “Covid 19” as the excuse, is sadly wrong and it was most likely wrong even before the Enabling Act of March 2020.
After all the Infectious Diseases Act of 1984 (yes – Orwell, 1984) could have been used for a lot of the abuses the powerful felt like inflecting upon us.
Ironically, of all places, SWEDEN seems to have laws – in the old sense of “fixed rules which limit the powerful”.
The Swedish government was told it could not have a lockdown because it would be “unconstitutional” – a meaningless concept here (and it is becoming a meaningless concept in America as well – ask Dread Pirate Roberts and his Supreme Court).
After taking legal advice the Swedish government decided to make a virtue of necessity and pretend (yes PRETEND) that they had always wanted to follow the path of liberty.
“Chris is quite correct about American vaccine law – it is one of the areas (another being firearms) where the insanity of “strict liability” does NOT apply”
Well, they hope not.
Covid vaccines aren’t going to be listed under the NCVIA, IIUC. They’ll be listed under the companion Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). It has a more epidemic flavor than the vaccines under the NCVIA. What the makers are seeking right now is the official listing in the CICP process as a covered drug so they know they’re safe. Failing that, they’ll be subject to strict liability in some states. (This is not my area. This is my understanding from reading, not practice.)
GAVI is a wonderful organisation dedicated to the vaccine nirvana.
It also turns out that our friend Neil Fergusson was at least in part funded by GAVI at around the same time that Ferguson was advising the British government to shut down the British economy and sacrifice 20% of the economy ( other people’s livelihoods ) to the greater good. What a selfless man.
The point is, a multibillionaire who cobbled together a pretty bad operating systems and a several times fortune doing so, wants to vaccinate everyone in the world (but himself) and make a few extra billion getting paid by governments around the world to do it, too.
Thank you, thank you, for the opportunity to be injected with something, cobbled together over the space of 9 months, anyone else might call that assault. But I recognise it for the beneficiant actions of benign plutocrat, a rare thing.
Oh! In other good news, Ferguson is separated from his wife. Incomprehensible! Doesn’t she realise what a hero Neil is? The ungrateful bint.
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
Can’t escape that? Surely there’s some body in the EU that can modify a European directive.
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They protect my life, my property, and my freedoms from the strong and the powerful, they allow me to predict outcomes and consequences, and, if one looks primarily to common-law and precedent, they tend to make sense because they’re built on humans deriving right and wrong choices from experience.
(And sometimes they provide an income, which I admit can skew your perspective.)
Surely the solution from the vaccine inventor’s perspective would be to sell the vaccine to the State? For a healthy profit on money invested and a big contract to produce the vaccine for many years to come of course.
I’ll go for product liability in this case. I worked for Astra Zeneca in a previous incarnation and they fully test these products in line with long tried and tested processes. The fact they want immunity tells me that it has not been tested properly and tbh the fact it is ready now tells me it hasn’t followed these processes. There have been several drugs in the past that didn’t follow these processes and I’m sure many of us know the names and what happened.
This virus does not require the risk involved with releasing an untested vaccine. It is just our useless government does not want to admit it overreacted so it is doubling down on how bad it is. I won’t be queuing up for this. They will have to send people around to to take me to a prison where they can hold me down.
I suggest you might want to read the published literature on SARs CoV 1 vaccines, as well as other coronavirus vaccines. Low success rate, high side effects rate, with the added bonus of some of the vaccines potentially generating new mutations that are more virulent than the original virus.
That’s why the only “successful” coronavirus vaccines are given to domesticated animals. Farm animals and pets tend not to sue in court in product liability law-suits.
Paul Marks wrote:
I am not so optimistic that Gates will not succeed for the simple reason that there has been no pushback against his medical tyranny. Things will get worse, we have already been forced into our ghettos. What’s next, digital arm bands of sorts? (Yes, history does repeat itself). Why not just tattoo us Bill? Will you demand bluetooth armbands be worn to wirelessly transmit medical data at all checkpoints? We won’t hear that old phrase “Your papers, please” everywhere because the ‘authorities’ will know automatically.
I have been getting a regular flu jab since being diagnosed as diabetic in 2013. I have never had any side effects from that one. I seem to have a fairly robust immune system and don’t get colds or flu very often anyway. I’ve still had the odd bout of relatively mild flu since 2013 but I have also occassionally escaped one that people around me have all had. This suggests that the ordinary jab is sometimes effective. I’m left wondering how different a jab that is specifically for the Covid 19 bug is from the general flu jab. Since the general one has to be updated every year as the prevalent viruses change, I would have expected that the regular update would include the Covid 19 virus as a matter of routine.
AtraZenica have every right (morally, and I hope legally) to withhold the drug (until fully tested) from any market that refuses them a legal regime recognising it is not yet fully tested. If the EU thereby denies it to its citizens – well, EU decisions are usually bad (we’ll see about this one).
People who look back on their 80th birthday and/or have appropriate co-morbidities could compare the stats and, perhaps rationally, decide to chance taking the vaccine. Alternatively, they could wait until and unless early symptoms appear, then start hydroxychloroquine and zinc, another approach that has yet to complete its full testing cycle. Or they could do the first and keep the second in reserve.
If the rest of us are told that taking it is the price for getting the lockdown state off our backs, then an assessment of the lesser evil will apply. I shall try to avoid being in the first rush – and since opinion polls suggest people under the age of 85 overestimate their risk of death from the ChiComCold, I expect to succeed in that aim.
It is a vaccine for a damp squib flu and is likely more dangerous than the so-called “pandemic” which is a pack of lies.
Take it at your own risk and don’t come whining if it fucks you up. An attitude shared by the assorted scummy govts behind it.
Gates has form for trying to use vaccine handouts to try and sterilize various African populations.
Not past belief that this is an Agenda 21 attempt at mass sterilization of humanity. Wouldn’t be noticed at first but then fertility drops off a cliff and that 1 billion techno-peasants serving 2-300 million scumbag elite is on the way.
If effective at leaving most of mankind firing banks into empty pots with disconnected plumbing the mass decline in human numbers would be unstoppable.
Bile and Smel Gates would be in a certain amount of trouble tho’. He might think he has cash enough to protect them–or his globo mates will if he can’t. And they might. But it might also suit the “elite” for the world’s new most hated couple to find themselves on the wrong side of a security door with a howling mob. A lot of lines of inquiry would be severed forever by that .
Don’t touch the vax crap with a bargepole.
Agreed.
No Vaccine, strict product liability.
I’ve never had much faith in humanity, even less these past months: it might be a good thing if all the terrified fools who would rush to be vaccinated were to suffer the side effects. What other hope is there that the world will come to its senses.
Pfizer / BioNTech hope their vaccine will be ready for US regulatory review by October. Instapundit quotes speculation that a vaccine in October would be the wrong sort of October surprise for those who usually present one, since there’s been a lot of “wait for a vaccine” from the keenest lockdowners. We’ll see.
Anyone else remember Thalidomide? I’ll have the strict liability and Bill Gates’ head on a spike thanks!
Disagree. Voluntary vaccine & limited product liability.
Don’t want it? Then don’t take it.
I’ll give that argument a “meh”. Hydroxychloroquine may not have been tested on Covid-19, but it has been in widespread use to ward off malaria for many years; and zinc lozenges are a well-known folk remedy for colds and flu. They’re both inexpensive, and have a good safety record. Neither were controversial until politics hit. 😡 I’d feel a lot safer taking them than getting a new vaccine. And I’m in several of the high-risk groups.
Me too, Ellen (I should have included a smiley, or put the “yet to complete its full testing cycle” in quotes). I was intending to mock those people who will insist the vaccine be fast-tracked (though maybe not quite so fast as October) while demanding Hydroxychloroquine be withheld till the full test cycle be complete.
“I was intending to mock those people who will insist the vaccine be fast-tracked (though maybe not quite so fast as October) while demanding Hydroxychloroquine be withheld till the full test cycle be complete.”
Quite so. Although it could be taken as mockery of those who want Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin + Zinc fast-tracked for immediate use, but demand any vaccine be withheld until fully tested. 🙂
The question I’m asking myself, though, is why does only one side here merit your mockery?
“Neither were controversial until politics hit.”
However, they’re not the first drugs to get tangled up in politics. Comments like “(Mr “Bill” Gates would love it to sterilise people or alter their genetic make up – but I do NOT think this lunatic will get his way, at least not this time)” and “Gates has form for trying to use vaccine handouts to try and sterilize various African populations. Not past belief that this is an Agenda 21 attempt at mass sterilization of humanity.” allude to a pre-existing politicisation of medicines – vaccines specifically – that doesn’t have anything at all to do with President Trump’s Tweets.
Medicine is always a trade-off between competing risks. All drugs can have harmful side effects, even ones that don’t do anything. The conditions they treat do harm, too. The ‘health scare’ campaigners make their case by ignoring one whole side of the risk balance completely and taking a zero-tolerance view of risk on the other side. It’s been going on for years.
But it’s always funny to watch when they switch from one side to the other mid-argument. 🙂
NiV: “Although it could be taken as mockery of those who want Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin + Zinc fast-tracked for immediate use … ”
I don’t know, I hope you are being deliberately obtuse.
That combination of ingredients have each been in the market and at the disposal of GPs for years. Probably in the USA, you can ( used to be able ) buy them across the counter. Only now, are you concerned that ‘stupid people’ might cause themselves harm.
The risk calculation is, they each are a known quantity, have a long history of being prescribed individually and probably severally together, and consequently we can hazard a guess that the side effects if taken in moderation ( unlike several of the trials you laud, where Hydroxychloroquine was prescribed in poisonous doses ) it is a reasonable risk that the combination will not injure the person who elects to take that combination. You may be right, it may not help that individual either. But someone suffering with COVID-19 is unlikely to die of Hydroxychloroquine poisoning if they administer the appropriate dose, before they die of COVID-19.
You, can tickle your arse with a feather as that seems to be your preference, or inject yourself with ditch water. Honestly, I don’t care which you choose. But I’d prefer if you didn’t attempt to interfere in my choice and promote your more expensive and more dangerous ( if only because its [the new wonder vaccine] unknowns are unknown ) solution of a vaccine.
“That combination of ingredients have each been in the market and at the disposal of GPs for years. Probably in the USA, you can ( used to be able ) buy them across the counter. Only now, are you concerned that ‘stupid people’ might cause themselves harm.”
All drugs have side-effects. All drugs cause harm. The question is always whether the benefits outweigh the harms. For existing conditions, that trade-off has been done, and the medical community have decided that the drugs are ‘safe’ in the sense that the risks are worth it. But that doesn’t mean there are no risks.
Also, the drugs are currently prescribed for people who are not seriously ill with Covid-19, pneumonia, inflammatory overload, blood clotting issues, and damage being done to other organs like the heart, kidneys, and intestines. Not to mention being used in combination with a bunch of other drugs specific to treating all that. What’s safe for someone with malaria might not be safe for someone with pneumonia, or on steroid anti-inflammatories. The dose is different. How often it’s administered is different. It’s like saying I’ve had chilli in Kormas for years with no problems, so this Scorpion Reaper Vindaloo Special I’m sitting down to eat is going to be just the same.
“( unlike several of the trials you laud, where Hydroxychloroquine was prescribed in poisonous doses )”
I’m not totally sure, but as I understand it this was based on the in vitro trials they did with vero cells, in which HCQ inhibited infection by SARS-CoV-2. They needed quite a high dose to get that effect. The dosage given to patients was calculated to be sufficient to expose cells to the minimum dose the in vitro experiments said was effective.
Pretty obviously, if you do an experiment showing you need 100 micrograms per litre to get an effect, and dose people in your trial to expose the cells to 10 micrograms per litre, we can reasonably “hazard a guess” that it’s not going to work.
The problem is, we don’t know what “the appropriate dose” is until we’ve demonstrated efficacy. You can’t tell if it is a “reasonable risk” if you can’t measure the benefit that you’re trading against that risk. It’s a reasonable risk compared to the risk of malaria, at the doses needed to effectively treat malaria. But it’s not risk-free, and we’re flying blind until we can quantify exactly how much we need to have what effect, with what harms and benefits, to set against the risks of the disease we’re treating.
“But I’d prefer if you didn’t attempt to interfere in my choice and promote your more expensive and more dangerous ( if only because its [the new wonder vaccine] unknowns are unknown ) solution of a vaccine.”
I wouldn’t dream of interfering! All I’m doing is pointing out that the issues are exactly the same, and I find it amusing that people can seemingly argue on both sides of the same question at the same time!
If Niall can mock their inconsistency, then surely so can I?
Perry,
That wasn’t the option listed but I agree that it would have been a good choice.
When they are testing drugs for fatal diseases, cancer, etc. I think that after the double blind is set up they should also have a batch for those who won’t be making it providing it is liability free. It’s a win win. If it works and saves someone that is a win and the supplier gets some extreme testing results for their study. Another win. Outside that we should not encourage the removal of product liability.
Sell two versions. One without product liability. Another at a higher price that does carry product liability. The higher price is essentially an insurance premium for an insurance scheme that pays any legal costs. Let the market decide.
As evidence regarding its safety comes in, the premiums should fall in price. While it’s high, that gives the customers a more accurate idea of the risk they’re taking. If some people are willing to take the risk, they can get it cheaper and more plentiful. If other people want guarantees, they can pay for it without imposing their costs on everyone else.
And if you think they’re over-charging for their insurance but still want protection, buy the cheap version and insure it yourself.
The polipork seem determined to push the vax with no choice. Not all and not quite yet but there is enough poison about compulsion emerging from their bad breath maws to illustrate what they would like to do. Maybe plan to do save that about one third of humanity won’t play ball. And hopefully wont just allow themselves to be made 2nd class citizens for refusing Gates gripewater
And why vax without the ability to sue–across huge swathes of the world just in time for the present shit-show?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i3dB2qWbA
NiV: “I wouldn’t dream of interfering! All I’m doing is pointing out that the issues are exactly the same, and I find it amusing that people can seemingly argue on both sides of the same question at the same time!”
I don’t agree the two scenarios are exactly the same.
Scenario 1.
A medicine or cocktail of medicines have been on sale and in use for decades, the side effects of each in isolation is well known, and well documented. If ever there was a case where an individual could make a considered and – if he/she chooses to inform him/her self with the available documentation – informed decision, should he dose him/herself with Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin + Zinc in conjuction with consulting his/her GP. Is not the same as …
Scenario 2.
cobbling together a ‘vaccine’ in the space of six months and compelling individuals to be injected with said vaccine*.
* That is waiting in the wings, and if not overt compulsion, then in order to lead a ‘normal’ life, you will have to accept the vaccine. Because if you don’t, you won’t be able to travel, it looks like you won’t be able to go shopping, already I have my temperature taken if I want to walk into a Pub, your life will be dramatically curtailed.
I’m pretty sure that by the time the vaccine comes, the pandemic will be over. It’s all but over now in the US. At most the vaccine may put the final nail in its coffin.
This is interesting.
Post surgical wound infection rate went down by half when operating theatre staff didn’t wear surgical masks.
Masks over the nose an mouth might actually promote infection.
Nullius in Verba (August 24, 2020 at 12:00 pm), a better comparison is implied by my post at Niall Kilmartin (August 23, 2020 at 5:49 pm), which reports speculation that Trump haters may object to a vaccine in October. I saw when I posted that – and commented to this thread precisely because I saw it with a quiet smile – that if one side yells “fast-track it” and then suddenly yells “but not that fast”, then ‘our side’ may be tempted to switch as abruptly from mocking the risks they take to mocking their caution – which would indeed have some danger of looking more like imitation than mockery.
As regards my later comment you responded to, others have since pointed out that the risk of the fast-tracked vaccine is unknown, that of the established hydoxycholoquine very known. To be less cautious about the new vaccine does invite mockery.
“As regards my later comment you responded to, others have since pointed out that the risk of the fast-tracked vaccine is unknown, that of the established hydoxycholoquine very known.”
And as I pointed out, it’s *not* known in these circumstances (different dose, different schedule, different comorbidity effects, and lots of potential drug interactions), the benefits you’re trading against the costs are not known at all (we don’t even know if it works), and it is in any case a definite non-zero risk, even based on the documented side-effects (which I highly doubt most of the people arguing for it have bothered to look up).
Rational choice in the face of a trade-off between opposing risks and benefits requires that we know *both* cost curves. How much does the risk of Covid-19 decrease as the dose rises? How much does the risk of harmful side-effects increase as the dose rises? Where do the marginal risks balance? You have to have measured both to have the information you need to make a decision.
So on the one hand you can wait until you’ve got the information. That means waiting for randomised trials and multiple checks and lots of studies, which could take years to do it properly. In the meantime, lots of people are dying, and lots of damage is being done to economies. Or you can take a chance on an unknown. Unknown risks. Unknown probabilities. Which results in lots of opposition from the risk-intolerant.
It’s arguable the uncertainties might be greater for a new vaccine than for HCQ, but they’re significant for both. It’s arguable that the expectations are higher for a vaccine than HCQ, against which the evidence is mounting. But in any case, it’s a difference of degree, not kind.
Either you’re going to insist on drugs being proven to do more good than harm before you use them, or you’re not. I think the medical profession’s view is to wait for evidence, but given the magnitude of the problem, be willing to accept somewhat less than they normally insist on. The political peanut gallery want to either demand all the usual evidence, or require none at all. Or rather, they are going to do *both*, depending on which side is advocating for the particular drug in question.
I just thought it was amusing. Almost as amusing as the bit about Bill Gates trying to sterilise and genetically modify the Africans. 🙂
Nullius in Verba (August 24, 2020 at 11:27 pm), we should agree to disagree on which is funnier (or stranger) – what you assert is funny, or the spectacle of you trying so hard to equate the risks of a wholly novel vaccine with that of repurposing a medication about which much trial and use data has been amassed. One of the vaccines may turn out to be effective and side-effect free – I certainly hope so.
As regards Bill and Melinda Gates, I noticed a comment above about “cobbled together a pretty bad operating system” which reminded me a bit of the PC attitude to western civilisation. Windows, like WesternCiv, has many faults, but if it suddenly stopped working entirely, its too-strident critics would as suddenly discover why these faults should have been addressed more temperately. Bill and Melinda, like that western civilisation of which they are a typical example, show a tendency to utter PC absurdities – another fault it would be better to fix without shutting it down (here’s hoping BLM/Antifa will fail to block that option).
(Some of my work concerns 24/7 maintenance – changing the engine while the car is in motion – which provides ready analogies to improving WesternCiv without shutting it down.)
“the spectacle of you trying so hard to equate the risks of a wholly novel vaccine with that of repurposing a medication about which much trial and use data has been amassed”
You’re still missing the point. The data on HCQ amasssed so far does not apply to the current situation – it’s a different medical context – and it doesn’t answer the question. We’re still in the process of amassing the data we need to decide on its use with Covid-19.
And the data that has been amassed about HCQ indicates that it is far from benign. I think a lot of people are equating “currently used” with “totally safe”.
“As regards Bill and Melinda Gates, I noticed a comment above about “cobbled together a pretty bad operating system” which reminded me a bit of the PC attitude to western civilisation.”
It reminds me a lot of the Westerner’s commonly critical attitude to Western civilisation more generally. Not just from the PC. People tend to overdramatise the faults, comparing it to the worst of evils.
Windows is actually a pretty good bit of software, as software goes. It’s far from perfect, and frequently annoying, but it does the job. A lot of the critics are armchair theorists who failed to understand the main reason for its success was that what people really wanted more than anything else was interoperability. By becoming ubiquitous, it meant producers could produce software for everyone, and consumers could be confident of getting software in a format they could use. The same applied to Unix – because Bell Labs gave it away to universities for free, it became ubiquitous and hence the operating system of choice. There were better engineered operating systems even back then, but their markets were limited.
Likewise, Western civilisation, with all its faults, is pretty good. It is the fashion to compare it to the worst dystopias of history and fiction, to decry its weakness and decadence in the face of the stronger cultures of the barbarian invaders, to bemoan its inevitable collapse and decay, to ostentatiously fear its potential for totalitarian tyranny. It reminds me of the millennarian doomsaying of the Environmentalists, predicting the end of civilisation, of the ecosystem, of life itself. They are all missing the primary reason for its success, which is its adaptability and ingenuity in the face of obstacles.
Civilisations are not constructed by Intelligent Design, but by Evolution through Natural Selection. You do not sit down and plan how to solve every problem and build a perfect system able to cope with every conceivable situation. You cobble together lots of independently developed bits and pieces that you can fit together in various ways to solve whatever problems arise. The result is messy and imperfect. It is full of shambling mutant mistakes and evolutionary dead ends. It finds solutions by trying everything and throwing away all the ones that don’t work. So there is always a lot of failure and stupidity in the system. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
Many of the criticisms of both societies and software are variants on attempts to eliminate the possibility of faults through the Intelligent Design style of engineering. First you sit down and plan out the perfect society on paper. Prepare a response for every conceivable situation in advance. Implement. Hand over to the customer. Have yourself a day of rest and then go build something else.
But humans are fallible, the world is more complex than we can imagine, and we cannot build a perfect machine. What we need to build instead is an adaptable one.
Asprin and Ibuprofen if given in high enough doses and over a sufficiently prolonged period is know to cause upper digestive tract ulceration and bleeding.
Paracetamol if taken in high in a high enough dose, can cause liver failure, jaundice and an untimely death.
But when taken in a different ‘medical context’, with the correct precautions ( hint for the dim, don’t overdose ), they are both pretty good for headaches or muscle pain.
By your metric we should withdraw Paracetamol, Ibruprofen and Asprin, because they are known to cause illness and death.
Yours is the classic let the perfect be the enemy of the good argument.
Not many doctors would prescribe Thalidomide for morning sickness these days, but in a different ‘medical context’, it’s seems quite effective against some forms of cancers.
But it was so urgent back in March.
“By your metric we should withdraw Paracetamol, Ibruprofen and Asprin, because they are known to cause illness and death.”
Again, you’re misunderstanding what ‘my metric’ is. As I keep on saying, all drugs have risks, and the decision to use a medicine requires a trade-off of the risks and benefits. You need to know what those risks and benefits are – on *both* sides – to come to a rational decision.
Yes, aspirin has risks. It is also known to have benefits. Because the known benefits outweigh the risks, we choose to take it.
But with both HCQ and any proposed vaccine, we are as yet unsure of either. We don’t know whether there’s any benefit. We have only a partial understanding of the risks.
Now, you can either argue that the pandemic is such a big problem that we’re willing to take a chance without definite confirmation that the risk is worth it, or that without being given complete certainty and assurances we’re not. But that argument applies to them both.
No, the third option, the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 makes this seasonal flu, the eighth most deadly since 1993. That is, as flu epidemics go there have bee eight years in the last 27 where more people died of flu in the UK. But we didn’t shut down the economy, lose 20% of our GDP, nationalize whole tracts of the economy, explode the public debt and take deliberate measures to destroy what social cohesion there is in our society.
‘We’ don’t need to be spreading untruths (feeling charitable this morning), fear and dread. But none the less, some malicious individuals chose so to do.
If only the virus were as easy to predict as the MSM (h/t Instapundit):
If Trump himself pushes the vaccine, he will, of course, not be guilty of the contrast I mock here. It will be interesting to see how the PC, the ‘great and good’, the medical establishment, etc., fare on that. (And how well we ourselves fare; at least many of us share Trump’s point of advantage. 🙂 )
Meanwhile of course, the OP headline question remains as relevant as ever.
“No, the third option, the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 makes this seasonal flu, the eighth most deadly since 1993. That is, as flu epidemics go there have bee eight years in the last 27 where more people died of flu in the UK.”
Show me your data!
Here’s mine:
Table 3 – page 24 These are excess deaths during flu seasons.
2004/05 1760
2005/06 Not detected
2006/07 Not detected
2007/08 16
2008/09 9217
2009/10 2062
2010/11 2472
2011/12 Not detected
2012/13 5140
2013/14 Not detected
—-
Table 4 – page 54 These are deaths ‘associated with’ flu using a Poisson-distribution general linear regression fit.
2015/16 7371
2016/17 15047
2017/18 22087
2018/19 3966
2019/20 7990
See also figure 34 on page 51 of that second report for a plot of the all-cause mortality, which puts Covid-19 deaths into context.
Bear in mind that because of the lockdown we froze the epidemic short with only 6% of the population having been infected (antibody tests). Herd immunity requires 60-80% to be immune to stop it spreading, so we’re only about 8-10% of the way to completion.
So you should multiply that last spike in figure 34 by ten for the proper comparison.
There is out on the web somewhere, a presentation of this years deaths ( attributed to COVID-19 ) adjusted for population growth ( UK over 30 years ) which gives the impression that while in absolute terms a lot of people may have had their deaths attributed to COVID-19 ( I think this is worth linking here again* as a proportion of the population, those dying from seasonal flue ( ’19/’20 ) is the eighth highest since 1993.
* Eddie Large was in hospital suffering from heart ( his second heart ) failure. And contracted COVID-19 AKA seasonal flu, while in Hospital. But at least we saved the NHS.
The Belgian authorities allowed Hydroxychloroquine treatment from March 13th. A study of sizeable comparable using/non-using cohorts has passed peer-review. Quick summary: low-dose treatment reduces deaths by about a third.
The link notes in passing that Hydroxychloroquine can also be used in high doses (such use is standard e.g. in cases of malaria, since the benefits much more than outweigh the well-known side-effects and risks of high-dosage Hydroxychloroquine). However the Belgian study relates to Hydroxychloroquine’s also-well-known minimal-risk, minimal side-effect behaviour when administered in low doses.
It would be a pity if any in the anglo-sphere have been denied the opportunity to reduce their risk of death by a third just because the MSM once heard Trump mention it.
“It would be a pity if any in the anglo-sphere have been denied the opportunity to reduce their risk of death by a third just because the MSM once heard Trump mention it.”
It would be if it was true.
Your link is to a non-randomised, observational trial, which means that the populations with and without HCQ are significantly different. For example, the median age of the people receiving HCQ was 66, compared to those without having a median age of 77, over ten years older. As a result, there are a number of other differences in pre-existing illnesses, with the untreated group being significantly more likely to have heart disease (41% vs 31%), kidney disease (17% vs 11%), and neurological disorders (13% vs 7%) or cognitive disorders (18% vs 8%).
Also, the patients receiving HCQ were far more likely to be put on ventilators (11% vs 3%) and to be admitted to intensive care within 24 hours of admission (7% vs 3%), although this was probably because their symptoms were more severe.
It’s quite difficult just looking at those results to tell how much of the difference in mortality is because they received HCQ, and how much is because they were on average ten years younger and 2-4 times more likely to be put on ventilators in intensive care. Did doctors decide it wasn’t worth trying so hard with the older patients, which was why they didn’t prescribe HCQ?
It would have helped if the study authors had used ANOVA (and I’m curious why they didn’t), but even then, it’s hard to account for non-linearities and confounders. These sorts of studies are hugely messy, very susceptible to spurious relationships, and the epidemiological rule of thumb is that for non-randomised observational trials you pay no attention until the risk ratio exceeds 2, which this one doesn’t.
(This is the same basic technique the Daily Mail uses to find their “Everything Causes Cancer!!” headlines. Beginner reasearchers are not experienced enough yet to discover anything really new, but need to publish lots and lots of papers to stay funded, as the government use that as a metric to check if they’re getting value-for-taxpayers-money, so they dredge up this sort of shit out of the statistical noise and get an easy paper. Everyone in the business knows not to pay any attention.)
This sort of difficulty disentangling possible alternative causes is precisely why we’re waiting for the randomised trials. The medical establishment have paid no attention to negative coverage in the media, are taking HCQ seriously, are prescribing it off-label in many cases (~60% in Belgium, apparently), and are publishing more papers on it than any other drug, by a long way. It’s plain nonsense to say it’s been taken off the table globally because of stupid partisan American politics. But at the same time, medical science has to be evidence-based and statistically sound, or it’s just pseudoscientific quackery, and the evidence ain’t in yet.
Shouldn’t that be, “It would be if it were true?”
Should it?
Subjunctive or indicative?
I seem to remember we have some talented grammar pendants on the team standing ready to answer questions like these!
Would that we still did.