A popular argument against the various vaccine mandates imposed upon citizens the world over is that they violate the Nuremberg Code of 1947. Many point out that the Code states that, as regards any experimental medical treatment, “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential…without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion.”

The common retort is to insist that the COVID-19 vaccines were not “experimental.” This appeal seems a little desperate—a grasping at straws.

In medicine, there’s no substitute for time, and when COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out to the public, there were no long-term studies into their impacts. Though it is said vaccines protect the most vulnerable from severe disease, many of the claims made about the vaccines’ effectiveness proved to be wrong, and many adverse effects in younger populations have manifested. People seem to want to pretend that the scale of the experiment—hundreds of millions the world over—somehow renders it not an “experiment.”