alt Hacker NewsA tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
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The Covid vaccine was not recommended in Germany and other EU countries for children. The risk of the vaccine was higher than the benefit for them.
It think the guidance was more nuanced for teens, but for kids it was very clear.
The vaxmaxxer vs. antivaxxer - like most culture wars - is a US phenomenon.
> It's a trade off but it's one that must be made
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
It's a false trade off because without vaccines, the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger!