Some comments: * Re: blood-clotting, I think you’ve bolded the wrong section. “it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures” is the part to bold, which makes the rest of the sentence rather pointless. You cannot use pre-COVID figures to estimate expected blood-clotting when we’re during a pandemic which involves an illness that specifically causes blood-clotting. * Institutions use extensive amounts of caveats and other forms of blame-avoiding language as a matter of course, but this language doesn’t contain much information. That is, irrespective of how high the actual risk is, I wouldn’t expect the language to change much. For instance, the phrase “patients should be aware of the remote possibility” is a waste of time for me to read, and for them to write, unless it affects the agency’s actual public health guidelines. * The focus on this one particular symptom is arbitrary. It seems implausible that a drug that actually made people sick would do so only via rare blood clots and only in young people, whereas it’s commonplace in bad statistics to find arbitrary problems in arbitrary subgroups. Hence the accusation of p-hacking. This xkcd comic is a decent illustration of how such a thing can happen.
Now contrast that with the real harms caused by delaying vaccinations, as Zvi points out in his essay. Orders of magnitude more people will die due to delayed vaccinations, not to mention the second-order effect of harming vaccine acceptance worldwide for the foreseeable future.
Insofar as one accepts the notion that a) the risk of side-effects is not nearly high enough to warrant this response, and b) the harm to the vaccination effort and to vaccine acceptancy is orders of magnitude higher, then the actual political response in Europe looks like gross negligence, malfeasance, or outright malice—not of the form “let’s intentionally hinder vaccination and get people killed” (which I agree would be implausible comic-book villainy), but rather of the form “as a politician, I only care about avoiding blame; I don’t care if my (in)actions kill thousands, as long as I’m not blamed for this”, which has to me become an increasingly plausible lense through which to see politics. Here is one Zvi post on the politics of blame-avoidance and inaction.
For me personally, the part during Covid that soured me a ton on EU competence was this: The politicians were so worried of being blamed for wasting tax-payer money on expensive vaccines, that they negotiated lower prices in exchange for receiving vaccines months later. This calculation was so crazy and wrong-headed that you kind of need something like Zvi’s blame-avoidance model to make sense of it.
(Commenting from Germany.)
Some comments:
* Re: blood-clotting, I think you’ve bolded the wrong section. “it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures” is the part to bold, which makes the rest of the sentence rather pointless. You cannot use pre-COVID figures to estimate expected blood-clotting when we’re during a pandemic which involves an illness that specifically causes blood-clotting.
* Institutions use extensive amounts of caveats and other forms of blame-avoiding language as a matter of course, but this language doesn’t contain much information. That is, irrespective of how high the actual risk is, I wouldn’t expect the language to change much. For instance, the phrase “patients should be aware of the remote possibility” is a waste of time for me to read, and for them to write, unless it affects the agency’s actual public health guidelines.
* The focus on this one particular symptom is arbitrary. It seems implausible that a drug that actually made people sick would do so only via rare blood clots and only in young people, whereas it’s commonplace in bad statistics to find arbitrary problems in arbitrary subgroups. Hence the accusation of p-hacking. This xkcd comic is a decent illustration of how such a thing can happen.
Now contrast that with the real harms caused by delaying vaccinations, as Zvi points out in his essay. Orders of magnitude more people will die due to delayed vaccinations, not to mention the second-order effect of harming vaccine acceptance worldwide for the foreseeable future.
Insofar as one accepts the notion that a) the risk of side-effects is not nearly high enough to warrant this response, and b) the harm to the vaccination effort and to vaccine acceptancy is orders of magnitude higher, then the actual political response in Europe looks like gross negligence, malfeasance, or outright malice—not of the form “let’s intentionally hinder vaccination and get people killed” (which I agree would be implausible comic-book villainy), but rather of the form “as a politician, I only care about avoiding blame; I don’t care if my (in)actions kill thousands, as long as I’m not blamed for this”, which has to me become an increasingly plausible lense through which to see politics. Here is one Zvi post on the politics of blame-avoidance and inaction.
For me personally, the part during Covid that soured me a ton on EU competence was this: The politicians were so worried of being blamed for wasting tax-payer money on expensive vaccines, that they negotiated lower prices in exchange for receiving vaccines months later. This calculation was so crazy and wrong-headed that you kind of need something like Zvi’s blame-avoidance model to make sense of it.