‘Net Harm’ from COVID Boosters ‘Outweigh the Expected Benefits’: ‘First Risk-Benefit Assessment’ Gives ‘Five-Part Ethical Argument Against Booster Mandates for Young People’

“Our estimate suggests an expected net harm from boosters in this young adult age group, whereby the negative outcomes of all severe adverse events and hospitalizations may on average outweigh the expected benefits in terms of Covid-19 hospitalizations averted,” say study authors from Oxford, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins.

QUICK FACTS:
  • Doctors from Oxford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other prestigious universities authored a new study published in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) that presents the very first risk-benefit assessment of COVID-19 boost vaccines as well as five ethical arguments against mandates.
  • The study authors found that it takes 22,000 to 30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 to be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one COVID hospitalization and that forcing young adults to take booster shots may result in a “net expected harm,” including heart disease.
  • “Using CDC and sponsor-reported adverse event data, we find that booster mandates may cause a net expected harm,” the authors write, noting that for every one COVID hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults they anticipate there to be “18 to 98 serious adverse events,” including “1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males” as well as 1,373 to 3,234 other adverse events “which interferes with daily activities.”
  • The paper represents the “first risk-benefit assessment of SARS-CoV-2 boosters for young previously uninfected adults under 40 years old,” according to the doctors, and emphasizes there is “an expected net harm from boosters in this young adult age group, whereby the negative outcomes of all severe adverse events and hospitalizations may on average outweigh the expected benefits in terms of Covid-19 hospitalizations averted,” with “specific harms to males from myo/pericarditis.”
READ THE FULL STUDY:
STUDY GIVES FIVE ETHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST BOOSTER MANDATES AMONG YOUNG ADULTS:
  1. First, there is “no formal risk-benefit assessment [that] exists for this age group,” according to the study. The authors write that it is “arguably negligent that key institutions such as the CDC and FDA have not conducted a risk-benefit assessment either before or after recommending that all adults should receive a booster dose.”
  2. Second, vaccine mandates may ultimately “result in a net expected harm to individual young people,” which, according to the authors, “should provide a strong basis to argue for the ethical case against booster mandates for young adults.”
  3. Moreover, booster mandates for young adults “are not proportionate” because “expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given the modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission.” In order to be “ethically acceptable,” punishing students with severe restrictions of individual liberty for not receiving a booster “need to be justified not only by an individual benefit but by the expectation that vaccination reduces harm to others,” according to the authors. “Booster doses of Covid-19 vaccines provide no lasting reduction in the probability of infection or transmission and extremely low expected benefits to young healthy individuals, especially those who have already been infected. The net expected harms to individuals and the harms of coercive mandates themselves are not counterbalanced by a large public health benefit; such harms and restrictions of liberty are therefore disproportionate and ethically unjustifiable.”
  4. Booster mandates in the United States “violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes.” Although some vaccines are covered by injury compensation programs, these programs in the U.S. and Canada have “failed to uphold their social justice responsibility to injured individuals.” The authors emphasize how “[n]o claims have been paid out” by these programs even though there have been over one million vaccine injury claims. “It is highly problematic that young adults are being mandated to take a third dose—especially given the risk-benefit assessment—while the federal US vaccine injury program has failed to compensate but one Covid-19 vaccine-injured individual,” the authors write.
  5. Finally, booster mandates “create wider social harms,” especially in the form of mass coercion. University mandates “involve significant coercion in that they exclude unvaccinated people from the benefits of university education (or employment) and thereby entail major infringements to free choice of occupation and freedom of association,” a move that “effectively ostracis[es] unvaccinated individuals from society,” the doctors state.
BACKGROUND:
  • Data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) show that COVID vaccines have been linked to 1,394,703 injuries as of Aug 26, 2022.
  • Since have been 2,278,311 vaccine-linked adverse events reported to VAERS since the system’s inception in 1990, COVID vaccine-related injuries account for more than half of all vaccine adverse events, as COVID vaccines were only made available in Dec 2020.

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