2023-01-02
The Covid argument has become mired in emotional warfare - in fact, it was always so enmired from the beginning.
Nevertheless, even if we merely make the general pedantic safety case for the introduction of any new product you can think of, there is an established approach to ensuring that the product introduction will not cause excessive problems through being unsafe, and ensuring that any such (inevitable in the general case) problems will be mitigated rather than exaggerated. Fail-safe is a watchword for a reason.
Martin Geddes reviews the Covid Vaccine roll-out history from this viewpoint alone, and asks whether the normal type of precautions (such as might be appropriate for any commercial product, let alone the major pharmaceutical product of the century) were applied with due care.
It's abundantly clear that they were not, which leaves one to wonder how the companies involved would hope to get away with the possible safety issues. Speculating wildly, one might postulate some unlikely methods:
- Hide as many serious adverse events as possible from being publicised
- Make the reporting of adverse events problematic
- Ensure that the regulators ignore any that are reported
- Bearing in mind that product failures follow a "bathtub" U curve where most failures follow quickly upon first use and the remainder follow much later after the product has been in use for some time, ensure that the initial high failure incidence is disguised, perhaps by counting them differently
- Bearing in mind that product failures follow a "bathtub" U curve where most failures follow quickly upon product first use and the remainder follow much later after the product has been in use for some time, ensure that these later failures are delayed by a significant period, making it difficult to attribute them to application of the product
- Prevent any legal challenges, for example litigation for damages caused to recipients, in case the above prove insufficient in some areas
Of course, the idea that as responsible and safety-conscious an industry as the pharmaceutical industry would or even could actually resort to such steps is patently ridiculous and should not be entertained.
So what is the explanation?
My experience in the sphere of IT systems would indicate that if the system fails in spite of the logic being sound, then there is an underlying assumption (or maybe more) supporting the logic which does not hold true.
Can you spot it/them?
