Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News
A new pre-print analysis of information from a CDC and FDA reports suggests that there is a legitimate ethical argument against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in young adults, especially concerning booster shots.
The risk-benefit analysis was authored by nine health experts from top universities, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Oxford, as well as hospital systems and public health departments. The article, which was posted on The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), concluded that mandatory booster vaccination in college is “ethically unjustifiable” because “the harms of coercive mandates themselves are not counterbalanced by a large public health benefit” and infringe on individual liberty.
Researchers estimated that “22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29″ were forced to get COVID boosters in order to go to attend school.” They also suspect that the mandated booster vaccines have caused unintended harm in some individuals, which far outweighs the potential protection provided.
Per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities.
They then argue that mandates are unjustifiable because of the “modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission” and because “U.S. mandates violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes.”
The researchers assert that there should be greater protections for those who experience adverse events or serious injury after vaccination “because their free choice regarding vaccination has been limited.”
The federal government and institutions across the United States have mandated a product that has the potential to cause injury without providing adequate compensation for those that are permanently harmed or injured. Under the PREP Act, there is no liability for vaccine manufacturers that have an emergency use authorization (EUA) for their product.
Federal law has two compensation programs, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), that evaluate vaccine injury claims. The programs are funded by taxpayers. Pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines were released from financial liability thanks to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a time when pharmaceutical companies were inundated with lawsuits.
As of September 1, 2022, there have been over 10,000 claims reported to the CICP between 2010 and 2022.
However, the program has not compensated any individuals who filed claims related to COVID-19 vaccination. There have been 42 claims that were denied for failing to meet the “standard of proof for causation.” There are three pending claims which were determined eligible for compensation and are pending a review, one of which was the result of anaphylaxis, and two that are results of myocarditis.
The researchers highlight that for young adults, the benefits of vaccination do not outweigh the subsequent harms and that “coercion creates significant social harms” with noncompliance having significant social consequences such as “loss of unemployment, loss of internet use, restriction to off-campus vs. on-campus housing, delays or refusal to process student housing requests, loss of enrollment, a hold placed on grades, inability to use recreation facilities … or register for class and delays in [the] ability to repay student loans post-graduation.”
The federal government, health experts, and institutions across the country, however, continue to enforce arbitrary vaccine mandates for the new bivalent boosters that will target the Omicron variant in many instances, even though they haven’t been tested on humans in clinical trials.
The first COVID-19 vaccine became available in December 2020, when the FDA granted the first emergency use authorization (EUA) to Pfizer-BioNTech. This led to mass vaccination campaigns across the country and vaccine mandates.
In September 2021, President Joe Biden announced that the federal government would require most federal employees to vaccinate against the virus.