Debate With Whiteflame On Vaccine Efficacy

TOPIC:

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine provides improved immune response to the virus vs. natural Immunity

STANCES:

PRO Shall Only Argue That The mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Provides Improved Immune Response To COVID-19 vs. Natural Immunity

CON Shall Only Argue That The mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine DOES NOT Provide Improved Immune Response To COVID-19 vs. Natural Immunity

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DEFINITIONS:

All terms shall first be defined from Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary available here:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical

And if Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary cannot provide a definition, then Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary available at merriam-webster.com will be used for all other words.

Specific definitions for debate:

COVID-19: SARS-Coronavirus-2019 and all variants.

Natural Immunity: immunity from COVID-19 that does NOT come from vaccines. Does NOT include "partially-vaccinated" individuals. Only those with no COVID mRNA vaccine of ANY kind.

mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine: the Pfizer/Bio-N-Tech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine that was approved for emergency use by the FDA

Improved: an immune response resulting in less chance of severe COVID-19 symptoms and lower chance of death

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RULES:

1. Burden of Proof is shared.

2. No Ignoratio Elenchis.

3. No trolls.

4. Forfeiting one round = auto-loss.

5. Sources in comments or at bottom of round

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- 10,000 characters

- One week for responses

- 3 rounds

- One week for voting

- 8 point system

Looks good to me, at least on first glance. I’ll plan to post this sometime after your debate with Intelligence ends. I’ll discuss any potential changes with you before I add them. 

I don't think I would debate it until I find more time,. But in terms of bioethics it seems like on a personal level organ donation is a terrible ideal. 

Apparently they don't wait until you are actually dead to do the transplants. It's almost like a big cover up in the medical community because doctors recognize the value in organ donations but they do them only when a patient is brain dead and there are no clear indicators of when somebody is brain dead. The term itself doesn't have much meaning. There is also a substance they use on people in comas that are "brain dead" that makes it slightly harder for miracle recoveries to happen. 

There have been reports of "brain dead" people waking up just prior to having their organs harvested by surprised medical staff. A difference of a few minutes in their wake up times would mean they would be murdered. 

There is one report of a father taking his comatose son hostage because they were about to harvest his organs. He had a stand off with police. At some point his son woke up. When his son woke up out of the coma, the father ended the stand off by surrendering. He still received criminal charges despite his actions saving his son's life. 

I get the feeling you would take the opposite stance as me here. Currently my close relatives are not allowed to be organ donors because I don't want to get arrested for doing a similar thing in their defense.  I think maybe you can argue it is good on a societal scale, but certainly it increases your personal chances of dying and incentivizes doctors to declare you brain dead prematurely.

I know in some areas they tried to pass laws to make doctors wait until actual death to take organs, but doctors fought it saying organs are practically useless from dead patience and they needed to use "brain dead" patients. 

There are just some silent cover ups in this arena because doctors are making that classic trolley problem and applying it to real life. 

I should note that America has the dead donor rule I believe which makes this topic maybe less relative from an American policy perspective but it is still an interesting ethical argument for removing organs from a brain dead patients and you never know when the law will change

It sounds to me that you are arguing how organ harvesting is PRACTICED is morally wrong, and I agree with you.

Did you know you aren't just allowed to donate an organ to someone else who wants it? Your organ actually has to be APPROVED? What nonsense is that? Do you think the motherfucker on death row cares if your organ is a little fatty? He wants to fucking live. If that one gets a little bad later on, he can find another organ.

They throw out tens of thousands of organs a year because they aren't "good enough." While people literally die waiting for an organ. What madness.

I would say this guy makes a good arguments for why the dead donor rule is misguided, but he doesn't seem to discuss the outlier situations which are my main concern. https://youtu.be/Choa64znIeE

It sounds like not accepting shitty organs might be good practice. You have to consider that organ transplants can result in death for the person receiving them and apparently their organ works well enough for the time being and a terrible organ in most cases aren't going to extend their life

It's not very clear from all that what you're looking to debate. As Public-Choice said, it seems like the biggest problem you have is with the way organ donation is done, particularly in those instances where the person with those organs may still recover. I agree that those are problematic, and I'm not entirely certain what the arguments are for why it's necessary to take the organs before death, so I'm not sure what position you'd be arguing against that I'd be willing to take.

Basically the arguments made in part one and 2 of this documentary. https://youtu.be/IZyBM5UGi_I

If you are unfamiliar with how organ transplants normally work than it just may be of no interest but death is kinda ambiguous and brain death is even more of an ambiguous thing, some allowing a transplant at "brain death" can be problematic particularly since miracle recoveries do happen

Basically you can not transplant a heart unless you take it from a body with the heart still beating. Once you are actually dead, you can't transplant many organs

I guess it would depend on how we define "brain death" for the purposes of this discussion. I wouldn't argue that any view of brain death is sufficient.

I get the basics of organ transplants, that's not the issue here. It's more about what is and isn't in-bounds for this kind of debate. I'll skim the documentary later to see what you're looking at, but from what you've said so far, there are two possible takeaways: one, never harvest organs from patients declared brain dead, or two, we need to change the way we classify someone as brain dead and establish a standard for harvesting organs that sets that bar higher. If it's the former, we can have a debate. If it's the latter, then we already agree.

If you took that position, I would just prefer to take the status quo position. 

My goal with debate even when debating policy positions is to debate the philosophical underpinnings that are a part of that debate. 

I am curious though. If nobody I want to debate ever wants to take the status quo position, assuming of course nobody is arguing devil's advocate, they are in some respects acknowledging that even people they disagree with have better policy positions than what is the status quo. 

Which brings up another point. If the main 2 positions are both superior to the status quo, why does the status quo exist?

Doesn't this almost ensure some sort of dictatorship where one set of ideals rules, would be better than these compromised status quo policies? 

Are we all so busy hating each other that we don't see what is obvious? We should battle for a winner takes all system instead of behaving like a democracy? 

Still not very clear on what you envision my position would be in this debate, so can you state it plainly?

That's because I am not clear on it.

I was just curious as to if it was a topic of interest to you because of what I perceive as you being interested in bioethics.

I know personally if I did the debate, I feel like I would want to either defend the status quo or the position that organ transplants should only be done after the system dies as a whole and is unable to be resuscitated. If I took that extreme position though, I would want to debate against the status quo.

I haven't fully hashed out what position I would take, I wouldn't debate it anytime soon and if I did, no matter what position I took, it would be devil's advocate and a tool to examine the ethics of something resembling the trolley problem, where perhaps hospitals are put in an awkward position where the more skeptical they are of somebody's ability to recover the more it benefits saving the lives of many at the expense of 1. 

So essentially or worded differently, how much of a chance of recovery has to occur before it is ethical to harvest a person's organs?

Is one in a billion chance of recovery too high to harvest an organ or too low

What about 1 in 1000

I think 1/100 chance of recovery to just go ahead with a transplant is maybe about where the status quo is currently.

Remember, perhaps an average of 3 people die every time you try to give the person a 1% chance to live a chance to fight for their life  not that taking more risk would always result in not being able to harvest the organs. 

The term brain death by necessity must be very ambiguous. We also know that the term persistent vegetative state is also ambiguous. 

So I would want a debate that explores the lines of where responsibility to a specific patient vs the general public is. 

We all know that we want that line closer to the specific patient than society as a whole, but I think exploring precisely where that line should be, would be fun, and I think some sort of organ donation debate could be the best way to use the real world to explore that topic. 

I am willing to take extreme positions to explore it better. Either by saying the line of individual vs society should be all the way over to society or all the way over to patient, but I don't think 2 people taking a position near the middle of that line would be a good debate. I think the best debate would be where 2 people take extreme positions and the judges figure out using both arguments which side of the dilemma the line should be closer to. 

Sounds like this is something we'd have to spend some time thinking through, then. It sounds like you're having trouble deciding whether one of us should take the status quo position and have the other argue from something slightly off of it, or have us both take extreme positions and debate which is better. There's good reasons to do either one, it's just a matter of deciding which makes the most sense/would be the most interesting. 

If you were going to debate this you both would have to use the same agreed upon sources. Otherwise it will just devolve into a your source sucks and mine is better debate.

Isn't that basically all debates, though?

yes, but no one ever agrees to use the same sources.

It really shouldn't be. For example if Ii pull up a meta study that proves stretching is not beneficial than the opponent really should rarely be presenting a dualing study. They should instead read past the abstract and find out what it is actually stating.

So like I said. If I am pro on "stretching before exercise is pointless" and pull up a meta study on stretching that shows it lacks benefits, the opponent bringing up a dueling study is less effective than him pointing to the fact that said meta study pulled from 20 studies on stretching but those studies only looked at static stretching not dynamic stretching, so his affirmative on the resolution is an over generalization.

It's honestly retarded to ignore the data your opponent presents and try to claim yours is from a better source because their source is biased for some reason. Even biased sources are typically honest with the study results and how they conducted their studies. The issues is people drawing specific conclusions from those studies prematurely.

Or perhaps like I have seen in immigration debates where the side that is pro immigration will often present academic research that shows the impact of legal immigration. (Basically consisting of legal immigrants who are very well educated or wealthy not your typical illegal immigrant which the pro immigration side wants to open the borders up for).

I will often see con on that and similar topics to attack the credibility of the source and present a duelling source instead of just pointing out the weaknesses of the method used and pointing out the immigrants pro wants to open the borders to are better represented by studies on illegal immigration not legal.

The difference being that merely presenting a duelling study, allows the voters to pick and choose which data is more legitimate, when going over what the actual studies say is going to use the studies own words and methods against it and better reflect the truth.

If your opponent is presenting a scientific, sociological or other study of any sort it may be okay to criticize the source if quacks are behind it, but for the most part, even when the study is funded by a corporation or think tank, it is usually accurate. They may try to use small sample sizes or they may intuitively know how to conduct the study to misrepresent the data "like a cigarette company using sight tests to test the health of smokers", but they are usually being honest and all it requires is reading past the abstract. 

Which brings up another point. Debaters should not be merely presenting the conclusion of a paper. The debater presenting the argument should also be talking about how a particular study got to their conclusions. Otherwise just citing a bunch of studies is basically a form of gish gallop and shouldn't be taken too seriously by voters

What happened to the debate "The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine provides improved immune response to the virus vs. natural Immunity"?

I don't see it in Debates anymore.

We had a misunderstanding about the topic and didn't want the debate to devolve into a back-and-forth about how the terms are defined. We're in the early stages of figuring out another topic for debate.

Thanks.

Yeah. It was 100% mutual.

Not to mention there are no credible accurate sources to defend either side of the debate. Well there are, but whos going to believe any of them.