This has come up again with the J&J vaccine pause, but I'm curious how we should approach risk perception with vaccines and in general with public irrationality.
Let me just preface if I was in charge I wouldn't have paused the J&J vaccine and do think on balance we should be more accepting of vaccine risks vs the substantial risks of the virus.
A consistent theme among some libertarian commenters is that we shouldn't cater to the irrationality of anti vaxxers in decision-making. This parallels many of the debates on human challenge trials and vaccine approvals/testing in terms of overall risk tolerance.
My sentiment on risk tolerance is pretty amenable to human challenge trials and on informed consent use of untested/unapproved medicines and treatments. I generally think the FDA should be more cognizant of type II errors of delays in access to treatment caused by regulatory approval. And I also think that on vaccines the risk of the virus dwarfs any risk of the vaccines.
But many people don't share those risk tolerances. We can't necessarily wave a wand to make all those people different.
And unlike say other irrationality, a lot of these considerations have effects beyond the individual. We need the vaccine hesitant to get the vaccines for herd immunity. It would be one thing if the irrational group was very small, but it often isn't. Each person getting vaccinated is vital to herd immunity. And the irrational group is often concentrated in geographic clusters, further amplifying the issue.
And I think reputational safety matters contextually and shapes public risk perception. Vaccine related deaths are extremely rare, in part due to the regulatory regime. The last vaccine related deaths in the US were decades ago as a result of manufacturing errors, not inherent to the vaccines.
How does one navigate these issues when the public often doesn't share the same risk perceptions, and yet we need them to act accordingly?