In November 2021, I was invited by Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) to give a talk as part of a public webinar on vaccine safety. One of the goals of this webinar was to allow members of the public to ask questions and interact with professionals carrying out research in this area.
Population ethics is a subfield of philosophy that attempts to sensibly compare two populations that may differ in size and material circumstances, and decide which state of the world is better. That is, if we had the choice between one of these states being a reality, which should we choose?
It is a social movement that broadly aims to do the ‘most good’ in the world with limited resources. They advocate for making career choices and charitable donations that maximise altruistic impact. Their activities include writing research papers on ethics, analysing effectiveness of charitable organisations, giving career advice, and promoting pledges to donate a proportion of one’s income to charity. The main individuals who are credited with starting the movement are Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, both at the University of Oxford, and Australian moral philospher Peter Singer, at Princeton university.
Myself and a team of collaborators including Stuart Bedston at the University of Swansea, Declan Bradley at Queen’s University Belfast and Mark Joy at the University of Oxford recently published a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology studying waning of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness. One of the major findings of the paper is that for first and second dose of AstraZeneca and first dose of Pfizer, effectiveness of the vaccine against COVID-19 hospitalisation or death reached zero by approximately day 60-80 after receiving the vaccine, and then went negative.
It’s an economic theory which, in a nutshell, says that full employment and funding of various other government programmes can be guaranteed by printing money, and the inflation that would normally ensue can be kept under control by taxation.
Indeed.