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Sunday, May 9. 2021

"Safety first," the precautionary principle, and risk/benefit

The COVID terror exemplifies these important issues. I know people who still feel reluctant to leave their homes.


Safety Cannot Be the Only Goal. Pausing the J&J vaccine was a damaging failure to balance costs and benefits.


If perfect safety were somebody's goal, they should never ride in a car. Everything in life, including "quarantining," is a risk.



 If this exacerbation of preexisting vaccine hesitancy persists, the costs will be irreversible. Contracting Covid-19 poses a much greater risk of death than the J&J vaccine. Moreover, people who don’t receive the J&J vaccine face a far greater risk of all blood clots, including CVST, by contracting Covid-19 than they do from taking the J&J vaccine. Since early in the pandemic, we’ve known that people with Covid-19, especially those who are severely ill, have an increased risk of blood clots, leading clinicians to administer prophylactic anticoagulation. University of Oxford researchers found that the likelihood of CVST in the two weeks after being diagnosed with Covid-19 was 100 times the risk in the general population without the disease and about eight times the incidence following the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, which, like the J&J vaccine, employs an adenovirus platform. There was also an increased incidence of other potentially fatal blood clots in the abdomen after Covid-19 diagnosis...



Posted by The Barrister in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 12:23 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)

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Everything is a risk, but that's not even close to the most important reason to shun the "precautionary principle." These days the lion's share of both politics and news, as presented in the big media, is phony emergencies. Whenever there's a slow news day they make up another "crisis" and start gaslighting the public into believing it is a real danger to them.

Thus a more accurate term for the PP is a "false-alarmist's veto" on all human activity. To give them that veto would play right into the hands of the enemies of civilization who are really behind most of the Left, and in particular are behind the environmental movement.

The whole point of being an adult is getting to make your own risk/reward choices individually.
#1 jdgalt1 on 2021-05-09 12:49 (Reply)
>Thus a more accurate term for the PP is a "false-alarmist's veto" on all human activity.

The amusing part is that they are not even applying the PP correctly. It doesn't say "pick one potential threat and exaust yourself trying to prevent it." Instead, you should focus on antifragile design, conserving resources, and maximizing flexibility...so that you can respond to whichever threat actually emerges.
#1.1 OldCurmudgeon on 2021-05-10 09:59 (Reply)
The petroleum industry went through a period where 'safety first' became a mantra. It used to drive me crazy - it was mostly pushed from the senior executive level, where performance bonuses were tied to safety metrics. But it resulted in a poorly formed message that translated to, 'nobody moves, nobody gets hurt'. It absolutely destroyed efficiency, which is really fundamental to true safety culture, and led to a gaming mentality. In other words, workers came to believe in the game - not in 'safety'.

On the rigs, safety meetings became endemic; pre-job safety briefings started eating up valuable time, to little or no benefit. Endless risk analyses, permit-to-work procedures, task risk assessments, etc., all with a 'stop the job' type of approach.

What was lost was the sense of mission. We're not out there to work safely; we're not paid for that. We're paid to drill the well - and to do that in complete safety and with no environmental damage. If you keep a 'safety first' approach, you're really thinking 'safety only', and in reality you have created a hazard in the process.
#2 Aggie on 2021-05-09 13:39 (Reply)
The Covid clown show was created to gain control, power, and money. The CDC changed the way the cause of death was determined in March of 2020. One estimate given in August of 2020 was that the recorded 162,000 deaths was actually under 10,000 deaths due to Covid. The PCR test has little connection with reality and currently they use a lower number to determine deaths from the "vaccine" but continue to use the high numbers for other deaths and case numbers. The CDC has never been reliable and if you get a chance watch an old 60 minutes interview with Chris Wallace questioning the head of the CDC over the swine flu of the 70's. The CDC needs to be shut down, the building razed, and the ground salted.
#3 indyjonesouthere on 2021-05-09 15:03 (Reply)
...should be Mike Wallace.
#3.1 indyjonesouthere on 2021-05-09 18:05 (Reply)
Mike Rowe has been preaching a “Safety Third” message for years:
https://mikerowe.com/2020/03/walk-me-through-this-safety-third-thing/
#4 Jeff Brokaw (Link) on 2021-05-09 15:39 (Reply)
Excellent comments all. Thank you.
#5 barnhill on 2021-05-09 17:42 (Reply)
The worst thing about this ridiculous pile of lies is that, because of the wholesale corruption of the lion's share of the worlds medical professionals, we'll never know the truth about this non-pandemic and what it ever really was. The only thing we can know for certain, is whatever the official story is, it's a goddam lie from the pit of Hell.

My faith in humanity has never been lower.
#6 ccoffer on 2021-05-09 20:08 (Reply)
The complete set of risks from the "vaccines" are not known, and may not be known for decades, whereas we have a reasonable idea of the risks of the virus.

Not to mention that the medical community botched the handling of ill people in the early months of 2020, and still are to some extent. There are reasonable treatments that were discarded for political reasons, and it is clear now that putting people on ventilators was a disaster, a death sentence.

Above all else, the risks should be evaluated individually and any action taken decided individually. Not by government, at ANY level.
#7 ruralcounsel on 2021-05-09 20:39 (Reply)
Actually for most people, natural covid-19 infection is safer than any of the vaccines themselves. Have a look:

https://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?post=241561
#8 Abelard Lindsey on 2021-05-09 20:45 (Reply)
All medical intervention involves risk. The decision to undergo such risk requires that the individual does a personal risk/benefit calculation to make an informed consent decision to undergo or not undergo that risk. This decision must be purely personal, that it on the basis of personal protection only.

Any attempt by public agencies to coerce people into undergoing medical intervention by using any form of coercion (financial, legal, restrictions on travel, etc.) violates the doctrine of informed consent and it a violation of the Geneva Convention.
#9 Abelard Lindsey on 2021-05-09 21:50 (Reply)

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