The FDA ‘fully’ approved the COVID vaccine yesterday. I am vaccinated, but I also respect the choice of those who are ‘vaccine hesitant.’ In particular employers shouldn’t ‘mandate’ submission to an experimental technology, where workers bear unknown risks for private profits. Instead, workers should be able to bargain vaccination as a condition of employment, after informed consent; or, if ‘mandated’ the employer should assume the risk of any adverse consequences.
“Vaccine hesitancy” is legitimate because until yesterday the FDA has only approved the experimental vaccine for “emergency use,” and that approval was made only under political pressure—approve or be fired! “Publish or perish!”—the old academic trope in a new bottle. Since then, “vaccine hesitancy” has been progressively stamped on by the bourgeoisie. In acamedia, VH is often portrayed as the populist lunacy of benighted proles who willfully or knuckleheadedly don’t “follow the science.” This “full” approval rests on the same flaws as “emergency” use because even scientists aren’t “following the science.”
First, while the full approval process for biologics requires at least six months of evidence as well as plant inspections and other measures to fully vet the assembly process, under bourgeois pressure the FDA set “special” requirements for the experimental Covid-19 vaccines using novel mRNA technology, including requiring only two months of clinical-trial subject data.
And even then clinical-trial ‘science’ wasn’t followed. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests commenced, as “science” requires, with a control group: a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine. Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against.
Another flaw is now vaccine trials measured success—where they are setting goal lines, which are known as “endpoints.” Most of the trials are designed to declare a coronavirus vaccine effective if it reduces the number of mild cases of COVID-19, whether or not it reduces severe or fatal cases. The “endpoints” in company-sponsored trials (itself a problem—talk about gilding your own lily!) as flawed because they reflect patients’ subjective impressions of symptoms rather than items that are objectively measurable. Another “endpoint” could have been whether vaccines prevent people from getting infected in the first place, because preventing infection is essential to preventing the spread of infection, as even people who show no symptoms can infect others. On top of that, standard the FDA has set for coronavirus vaccine emergency authorization was only 50% efficacy for that “endpoint.” So the “endpoint” benefit is dubious, at best.
Long-term effects without a valid control are unknown. Who will bear the risks of negative side effects in light of these controversial “endpoint” benefits? Drug companies have been granted complete legal immunity. There isn’t any government-provided medical care for those side-effects, either.
Bourgeois doctors are no better in administering this ‘science.’ One hallmark of medicine is ‘informed consent,’ which involves informing about “the burdens, risks, and expected benefits of all options, including forgoing treatment.” For the reasons above, informed consent is impossible.
All this, for a disease which has a 99% survivability rate.
It’s entirely reasonable for a person to be “vaccine hesitant” under these circumstances.
So, why the rushed, flawed quasi-science?
Follow the profits, not the science. “If you’re a company operating in all 50 states and even internationally, it’s hard for them to move on the vaccine mandate and having a full FDA approval and authorization would make that easier,” Joseph Allen, an associate professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health who, as head of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and part of the academic complex supporting corporations, also advises companies on the virus.
As usual, profits are privatized, while risks are spread across the public. It is the latter, especially workers subject to an expensive, inaccessible, health care system who will ultimately bear the costs of bourgeois vaccine mandates, while the former reap the profits.
Notes
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-under-pressure-to-grant-full-approval-to-covid-19-vaccines-11627810202
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-business-mark-meadows-coronavirus-pandemic-0902fbb041b0459e55da86be75b1457a
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/11/fda-whitewashes-warnings-about-coronavirus-vaccine-trials/
https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/vaccines-and-related-biological-products-advisory-committee-october-22-2020-meeting-announcement#event-materials
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/informed-consent