If you don’t wear your seat belt, I am at greater risk of catching coronadoom. And thus my grandmother might die, you granny killer.
Is that what they mean by the vaccination-seat-belt analogy?
Maybe. Let’s see by reading the peer-reviewed paper “Vaccination, Risks, and Freedom: The Seat Belt Analogy” by Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu in Public Health Ethics. A paper, mind you, that came out in October 2019, before the coronadoom panic began.
Before we get to it, let’s agree to some facts:
- Strapping on a seat-belt will not likely injure you; it will not cause myocarditis or cancer; nor indeed will you suffer any side effect, except perhaps for a pinched finger or slightly burned chest (by wearing the belt shirtless on a hot day in a closed car).
- You will not need to be boosted, unless you are child under a certain weight and height. That is, as you drive, on a per-trip basis, you will not need to strap on a second, third, fourth belt during a single trip.
- If you do not strap on a belt, you do not lose your job.
- You do not have to provide proof of seat-belt use, except on rare occasions where police need to meet their ticket quotas.
- Foreigners can enter the United States without having to prove that they used a seat-belt in their home country.
- Seat belts can indeed protect against severe injury and death: they are efficacious and known to be efficacious; the evidence is unambiguous and clear to everybody.
- If you are not wearing a belt and crash, you will not cause harm to anybody else, except perhaps, very rarely, and indeed heretofore unheard of, as your shredded body exits through the windshield and lands on a passerby.
- If a belted person crashes, the injuries he may or may not suffer do not cause you physical harm. The belts themselves can sometimes, though rarely, cause worse injuries in crashes, crashes that are not individually predictable.
- Some belted people, but likely not many, may drive more recklessly, reasoning that they are “protected”, in the same way helmeted and padded football players tackle harder than bare-skinned rugby players.
- When you are done driving, even in places that mandate you must wear seat-belts while driving, you can take the seat-belt off.
I sincerely believe people on all sides of this debate would agree to these facts.
Now let’s see what our academics say.
I am pleased to copy their first two sentences, with which I am in agreement: “Like almost any medical drug, vaccination entails some very small risk of more or less serious injury. The risk is extremely small and normally it is vastly outweighed by the benefits of vaccines.”
Yes: vaccines by design cause injury, in the hope that later infections will be less harmful, and last a briefer time, hence reducing, but not eliminating, the chance of transmission.
And we all see their “normally” qualifier.
As I have tried to explain many times, vaccines do not prevent infections. And cannot. How could they? It is like saying seat-belts prevent crashes.
Tell people of that vaccination-seat-belt analogy.
What about mandates?
With coercive vaccination policies…the risk of vaccine injuries is simply imposed on individuals, either adults or children, and it is imposed without any underlying medical condition that justifies their use. The lack of any pathology to be treated reinforces some parents’ perception that the risks of vaccines are not only great and greater than they actually are, but also unnecessary…
Well, yes. But:
Needless to say, but perhaps worth emphasizing, there is no evidence to support the idea that the risk assessment of those who oppose vaccines—and on such basis oppose coercive vaccination policies—is rational. For instance, the flu vaccine, as mentioned earlier, might—and we say ‘might’ because the causal link is contested—entail a very small risk of causing Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a serious and sometimes incurable autoimmune disorder that can result in paralysis and death; the risk is in the order of 1–2 cases per million flu vaccine doses.
This argument goes wrong because if you take the vax, you purposely open yourself up to risk of injury, not just to GBS, which we also saw with coronadoom, but other injuries, too. Meaning the overall risk of serious injury or death from purposeful vaccination is higher than 2 in a million—a number which of course changes by kind of vax.
Whereas, one might never even get certain diseases, and if one does not, the chance of GBS (or other injury) due to the vax or that disease is 0.
And then, especially if one is young and strong, one might properly judge oneself unlikely to be badly injured by the flu, another malady—or the doom. Especially the doom.
How did they forget this part of the argument?
And then one might have already had the doom and have gained naturally acquired immunity, and therefore the risk of injury from re-infection is very low or negligible, especially if one is not old. Something is similar for flu, which has, like the doom, many variants. It’s not as true for other diseases, mainly found in childhood.
So it is indeed rational, and could even be, as with the doom in many cases, the better bet not to be vaccinated.
And this is all before considering the efficacy of the vaccine, about which our authors are largely silent, saying only things like vaccines provide a “significant benefit”. They do not quantify this benefit.
Which for some vaccines can be high. Say, measles. But for some vaccines it can be low, over-promised, and lied about by public officials—like the doom.
Do I even have to remind you that Pfizer initially claimed an efficacy against infection (an impossibility) of over 95%? And that we are now on our, what, fourth or fifth shots? And that the same sources are now bruiting annual shots? Each instance bringing new risk of injury. (Again, our authors knew the doom vaccine not.)
On being rational, our authors say, “However, some have argued that vaccine denialists are not as irrational as they are sometimes taken to be; instead, they are often part what Mark Navin calls ‘resistant epistemic communities’ that refuse to trust science with regard to the risk assessment of vaccination (Navin, 2015: 31).”
I argue that rationality has left the room whenever anybody uses terms featuring “denialist” or “trust science”, let alone monstrosities like “resistant epistemic communities”.
We are now at the seat-belt analogy itself.
Let me agree with their first words about that, too: “There are two main reasons why coercive vaccination policies could be enforced: to protect vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated through herd immunity, and/or to protect the individuals receiving the vaccination.”
It is easy to conjure situations where, say, a virulent encephalitic virus, in a very real sense, rips through a population, destroying minds, with rates of transmission and severity of effect so large that it will with something approaching certainty destroy a civilization. In these cases, even modestly efficacious vaccines can be mandated.
This isn’t true for flu, and it certainly wasn’t true for the coronadoom.
Now “All Western countries have some form of seat belt mandates, with the exception of the state of New [Live Free Or Die] Hampshire in the USA; most other countries all over the world also have seat belt mandates”. The parenthetical remark is mine.
Of course, nearly all universities have DIE officers. So ubiquity is not indicative of the good.
And “seat belt laws were introduced and proved to be extremely effective in increasing seat belt use”, which is surely true. But it’s just as relevant that in France, guillotines laws were extremely effective in increasing the supply of headless corpses.
Our authors say that even if adults can choose to ignore seat belts, and hence vaccines, children have to have choices made for them, and if parents are going to make the wrong choices (no belt, no vax), the state should step in and criminalize dissent. To which I say: no. Not in these cases. Especially for the doom vax, because kids have such a low chance of dying from covid.
And because of the Slippery Slope. Once you begin letting Experts decide what is best medically for your kids, as we have seen, are seeing, and will continue to see, there is no end. No stopping point. The Slope has been greased with credentials. And horrors.
If the government can force blanket medicalizations, they can make you take anything.
Thus, adopting a more forward looking perspective, we can say that the fact that coerced vaccination is opposed by those who appeal to individual liberty and to mistaken risk assessment should not stop states from introducing coercive vaccination policies—unless we also think it was wrong to introduce seat belt requirements in spite of public opposition.
Something like that, yes.
Now that that’s over, I can give you the Big Reveal. We have met the appalling Julian Savulescu many times.
He wants to bioengineer people to “fight” “climate change”, design a pill to eliminate “racism”, claims to be against after-birth abortions but lists some ackshuallies, and so forth.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.