The article touches this briefly: I think it's horrible that the antivax movement successfully managed to push a working lyme vaccine off the market, based on concerns that turned out to be false.
Every time you get a tick you should remember that you could be safe from lyme, but the antivax movement took that away from us.
You're oversimplifying the issue which is described in some detail in the article. Yes, the antivax movement is killing thousands of people with their opposition to COVID vaccines, but that doesn't mean every vaccine ever studied was good, or that the FDA is infallible.
I'm not saying it was good that Lymerix was pulled from the market. I think it's unclear. I just think we shouldn't let (justified) passion on one controversy cloud our understanding of another controversy.
Yeah, one of the terrible things about the anti-vax movement is that it makes it hard to distinguish signal from noise when looking at objections or criticisms of any vaccine.
From what I understand the vaccine wasn't taken off the market by the FDA or science. It was taken off the market by the company producing it, due to pressure from lawsuits and bullshit concerns about risks.
so they would lose a legal challenge to the product's safety....but it's safe? How does that follow?
Liability is just a cost of doing business.
You ever had D&O insurance? Right now in blockchain businesses some get quoted 10+% for coverage, i.e. 100k+ for 1 mil in coverage. Many simply forego the insurance because it's too expensive, and assume the risk.
The product in question had too little upside to offset the liability, that's all.
> so they would lose a legal challenge to the product's safety....but it's safe? How does that follow?
You convince a jury that it is unsafe. Happens all the time. There are many reasons this is easier than it should be.
> The product in question had too little upside to offset the liability, that's all.
The vaccine had a ton of upside...for those receiving it. Like most vaccines, it's not a hugely profitable endeavor for the company producing it, so it wasn't worth all of the baloney being thrown around in court.
For me, at least $100, probably quite a bit more if I thought about it. However, I don't know that you could legally manufacture and sell/group buy such things. Nutraceuticals gets exceptions under the current, disastrous law but this wouldn't qualify.
If enough people pool in, you could underwrite your own clinical trial.
Why not? People have pooled-in to try drugs that are in development and not generally available yet. I can recall numerous instances: pitolisant, rintalimod, hyper immune IG, etc
Some went well, some were disasters, it’s the same as any other clinical trial.
If they completed the trials then they'd have some protection against major lawsuits. But no amount of legal protection would prevent low sales due to widespread public mistrust. Especially at a time when Lyme wasn't as rampant and terror-inducing as it is now.
Because in the US legal system that uses laypeople as judges ("juries"), lawsuits tend to be won by those who put on the best play for the juries, not by those who have the better arguments on their side like in Continental Europe. And to make matters worse, sometimes juries go for obscenely excessive damages against companies to "make a point" - just look at the McDonald's coffee case.
The McDonald’s coffee lawsuit was not frivolous[1][2]. The company served coffee at extremely dangerous temperatures. The claimant had severe third degree burns and only wanted McDonald’s to pay for her medical expenses. McDonald’s had a least 700 complaints about the problem before the lawsuit and did nothing until after the lawsuit. Please stop repeating corporate propaganda.
No, what happened to Stella Liebeck was terrible, and it's right that she had the public's sympathy, however her coffee was not excessively hot by modern standards.
Stella's coffee was served within the temperature range that was, and still is, recommended by professional coffee associations like SCAA and NCA [1]. The NCA recommends that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is likely near the temperature at which Stella was burned. This is a perfectly reasonable service temperature, widely used by coffee shops, restaurants, and home brewing machines to this day.
Stella Liebeck took her cup of coffee and squeezed it between her legs in order to fiddle with the lid. The result was tragic, but completely expected. If I spill a fresh cup of Starbucks coffee on my crotch today, I fully expect to sustain third-degree burns. So I take a little extra care with it until it has cooled to drinking temperature, which happens pretty quickly.
Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee. Spilling that on yourself is guaranteed to melt your skin. Great care is warranted.
Again, what happened to Stella was terrible. She didn't deserve it, and she didn't deserve the hate she got afterward. But she did something really stupid. I sympathize, because I do stupid stuff all the time, and I have the scars to remind me.
We're surrounded by extremely dangerous things that require great care to use properly. It's useful for coffee to be held and served hot, just as it's useful for knives to be sharp and cars to be able to reach highway speeds. There will inevitably be accidents, but making the world completely safe for people who use these things carelessly would mean depriving everyone of their proper use.
>The company served coffee at extremely dangerous temperatures.
Yes, it was frivolous to many peoples eyes, including mine. McDonald's still serves their coffee at the same temperatures today. They just changed the cups and added warnings at least according to the Wikipedia article on the case.
The McDonald's coffee case is often cited this way, but I think a spilled a coffee that causes third-degree burns and necessitates skin grafts is probably too hot.
The article you linked to notes they still serve the coffee at the same temperturea today, just changing the cups and adding warnings. Probably not too hot or they would have changed it after the lawsuit.
Coffee drinkers like their coffee hot. They tell me the taste is much better when it is brewed hot. I know I was working at McDonalds at the time of the suit, and a few weeks later we adjusted our temperatures to the minimum of the acceptable range from the max, and immediately got complaints. (the complaints didn't start until after the adjustment)
Would you not expect to get coffee made with boiling water? This is what you would get if you made it at home. It can't havr been much hotter than that or it would have evaporated.
Antivax are people who don't want to take the vaccine. They're not against other people taking vaccines or the development of vaccines. You're likely misinformed.
So you're saying the people who were shouting at people standing in line to get a vaccine against covid (which happened plenty of times in Germany and I'm sure in other places, too) are not antivaxxers?
Antivax isn't a single organized group, so being antivax can manifest in many ways. I know antivaxers who harass people who got vaccinated for Covid and protest.
> I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”
No, if you check my comment history you will see that I said something along the lines of don't flatten the curve, kill it with longer, harsher lockdowns. Just search for my top downvoted posts. I still maintain that stance, two months of harsh worldwide lockdowns would have killed the spread completely and we would have been completely opened by the middle of last summer. Australia almost managed it alone, and a bit more of the world joining them could have.
The data is not clear on this. Places that did no lockdown like Sweden have been pretty well off, other places that did heavy lock downs like NYC have not fared as well.
Sweeden has much worse results than that peers. NYC didn't do lockdowns well - the state sending infected people to nursing homes is the opposite of lockdowns.
> I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”
The vaccines were working perfectly in that regard until we hit a wall of people unwilling to take them, which brought us in the US to where we are today when antivax lag hampered us from outrunning the delta variant.
Iceland[1], with >70% vaccination rates, is seeing much different outcomes even in spite of record infections.
You don't think vendors that sell products that can leave you maimed for the rest of your life, damage or eliminate entirely your earning potential, destroy your marital relations, and destroy future of your children should not be liable for injuries caused by their product?
Really? You are against holding people liable for faulty products?
There wouldn't be a single car being sold if it was the case.
The vaccine was approved by the FDA, they did their part making sure it was safe. 100% certainty is impossible, and people should not be held liable to that.
Here, they pulled off their product off not because it was shown to be unsafe but because it was unprofitable. Due to the controversy, it was a tough sell, and lawsuits are costly no matter if you are right or wrong.
It’s not OR but AND: as described in that article, the law firms didn’t come up with the lawsuit out of the blue but saw the hundreds of people who set up “victims” groups alleging all sorts of injuries caused by the vaccine.
It seems noteworthy that this was relatively early in the Internet reshaping society: these groups had websites but not massive companies like Facebook promoting them. This ability for people to self-organize and diagnose at a large scale is still having interesting ripple effects, both helping people with unusual conditions which are commonly misdiagnosed and helping build lawsuits or political movements from people who really aren’t interested in accepting the science.
Every time you get a tick you should remember that you could be safe from lyme, but the antivax movement took that away from us.