Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
EU Court Allows Anti Vaccination Suits Without Proof (cbsnews.com)
6 points by mianos on July 13, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



A lot of people are rightly concerned by this ruling, but I don’t think it is alarming as some are making out.

The actual ruling says:

> a vaccine could be considered defective if there is "specific and consistent evidence," including the time between a vaccine's administration, the individual's previous state of health, the lack of any family history of the disease and a significant number of reported cases of the disease occurring following vaccination.

>In a statement, the court said that such factors could lead a national court to conclude that "the administering of the vaccine is the most plausible explanation"

if you replace vaccine with 'Chinese takeaway' and disease with 'food poisoning' I think yup get a feel for what the court is trying to achieve here. And vaccines can have adverse effects on rare occasions with some people, such as the people who are allergic to the albumen in flu shots - although in that case the scientific consensus is clear.


Not just proof, even when it is the opinion of medical experts that the person in question did not develop adverse side effects from using the vaccine. They've set the bar so low that, should judges actually act on it, it's hard to imagine many companies being willing to supply them with vaccines.


Clickbait headline says “without proof”, but a more accurate summary of the article (and, more to the point, the actual ruling [0], which the article neither cites nor properly describes) would be “with only the same kind of indirect and circumstantial evidence that is routinely presented in lawsuits on every kind of matter in most jurisdictions, including those in the US.”

[0] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessioni...


But circumstantial evidence is to show cause or motive in these cases. Correlation niether proves cause or motive. It is my understanding that, in the case of a person vs corporation, correlation is all that is needed. This is not proof.


> Correlation niether proves cause or motive

Not in the logical sense, but legal proof isn't logical proof. It's evidence, each piece of which, makes a conclusion more plausible than it would be in it's absence, which taken together meets a specific stabdard. Cases (both civil and criminal) or made with only the type of evidence short of scientific consensus that this ruling concerns fairly routinely.


Didn't they just say they were going to make vaccinations mandatory? Seems a bit out of step with the "mandatory" part. I would think if they were mandatory, they determined that no diseases were caused by the vaccinations...


That was just France.

Hawaii could make vaccines mandatory, but it wouldn't mean that a lawsuit in Rhode Island about vaccines couldn't go forward.

[0]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-vaccin...


I greatly appreciate how vaccines help prevent disease, but like any medication, there can be adverse side effects depending on personal biology. Furthermore, they load up these vaccines with a lot of nasty chemicals.

If you look at how a lot of these vaccines trials are structured, they do a lot of sketchy things. Like instead of using saline as the placebo, they use the previously approved version of the vaccine, or inject all the chemicals, but just not the actual virus culture. That way negative side effects are even in both groups. Of course, it doesn't mean that vaccines are safe across the board.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: