The vaccines were so good at their job that the hospitals were full of unvaccinated people even after most people got vaccinated, and this astonishing feat of efficacy persisted for quite some time.
Normally I'm sympathetic to a bit of healthy cynicism, but when the official narrative is backed by extremely strong extremely public corroborating evidence, sorry, I'm not going to sacrifice the safety of myself and those I care about to indulge someone else's politically-driven blindness towards said evidence.
There is a disturbing trend on the right to reject literally anything a state org says as if it were some sort of brave rebellion against the system.
The CDC says wear masks? Suddenly it becomes a "mind control" issue.
The FDA recommends not drinking raw milk? Republican lawmakers are literally sickening themselves drinking bacteria-laden dairy products in front of their colleagues to "trigger the libs".
The FDA issue emergency authorization to get a COVID vaccine to the public as quickly as possible during a pandemic, and suddenly Conservatives are claiming that COVID never killed anyone, it's the Vaccine that's killing people, even as the unvaccinated make up the lion's share of the casualties.
If you dive deep enough into the antivaxxer movements (a deeply right-wing movement), you'll find people arguing that drinking industrial bleach (Miracle Mineral Cure) is the solution to every health issue that "they don't want you to know about", even as they are shitting out pieces of their intestines (Google "rope worms"). Of courset the government saying "don't drink bleach" makes them double down.
I am all for a healthy distrust of the government or any other ruling authority, but it feels like roughly half the the U.S. population is so brain-broken that they have fully embraced contrarianism as a worldview.
You trust vaccines which doctors recommend, just like all medical advise your doctors recommend. Otherwise you maybe a few that never goes to a doc because you never trust anything they say. Healthy skepticism is good but ultimately you go to them because they have a track record of saving people
Except the COVID vaccines passed clinical trials with flying colors. I believe not a single person from any of the Pfizer or Moderna trials died of COVID (people with the vaccine did, later, die of COVID, but at much, much, MUCH, lower rates than the unvaccinated). That's genuinely insane levels of drug success. You make an okay point, that the FDA needs some reform, but don't try to turn this into an anti-vax conspiracy ground, focus on actual issues where actual questionable activity exists.
The trials did indeed look pretty good, and they met their primary endpoints, but they were necessarily short-term trials, and IMO they were nowhere near as impressive as some of the old impressive vaccines. Try reading up on the history of the varicella vaccine:
Apparently you can give the vaccine after exposure, and it’s nearly 100% effective. 50 years after development and ~30 years after widespread rollout began in the US, the same vaccine still works, although the number of doses given has been increased to two because a single dose wasn’t quite good enough for herd immunity. (Chickenpox is far more contagious than at least the original COVID strain was.)
I rate the COVID vaccines as an excellent improvement for society, absolutely worth getting in most populations and unquestionably worthy of approval, but merely so-so on the scale of vaccines. (I’m not sure I rate them worthy of continued approval and widespread deployment at current prices. If nothing else, serious follow up should be required to determine how repeated use of the mRNA vaccines compares to, say, Novavax. And health agencies should consider moving to a fee-for-efficacy model instead of a we-pay-whatever model — if pharma companies know, in advance, that they’ll get paid more for doses of a better vaccine, maybe they’ll make one instead of resting on their mediocre laurels.)
You compare apples and oranges. These are completely different viruses. There are pills like aspirin that dont help against cancer either.. and we still dont have a vaccine against SARS-1 or MERS.
At least for the Pfizer study, no Covid-19–associated deaths were observed in the study or control groups so this says more about COVID and the study than about the vaccine itself.
They were able to assess the efficacy by looking for illness, not death. It takes some verrrry "special" framing to twist this into anything but an enormous success:
> BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6).
Yet the deaths clearly mattered when multiplied up to population scale, because COVID was able to fill up the hospitals.
Didn’t these companies ask for and get immunity from liability relating to these vaccines? What do you make of that?
Also are these products really correctly labeled as vaccines given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines? I wonder if some other term is more accurate and would eliminate some of the arguments around them.
Why wouldn't you ask for liability protection? No matter how safe, like even if the injection was actually pure water, thousands of people would be convinced they were injured and sue for millions which, even if you won every case, costs a fortune in legal fees.
No vaccine is perfect. They work by showing your immune system some example germ features, and most people's immune systems learn to defend against them. But immune systems are extremely complex and variable between people, and you can never guarantee a particular response.
Vaccines sometimes completely eliminate some diseases (smallpox is one). They do this not by giving every person 100% protection individually, but by reducing transmission enough that the germ dies out.
> given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines
Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.
Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.
They were never experimental. At this point in the game, if you're still repeating this lie, you're just revealing how little you understand about the world around you due to how much propaganda you believe.
And yes, refusing to do what your employer requires of you for the job will get you fired. Welcome to the free market. For decades employers have made vaccines for many different diseases a requirement of employment. You have the freedom not to get vaccinated, and your employer has the right to show you the door.
Look, literally nobody in the medical community considers it experimental.
If you want to believe that you were being experimented on by getting vaccinated, you are free to believe whatever you want, but you are 100% factually wrong and most everyone around you knows it.
> You have the freedom not to get vaccinated, and your employer has the right to show you the door.
They really shouldn’t have that right. It’s discriminatory and a violation of basic rights to bodily autonomy. No one should be forced to undergo a medical procedure for employment. Others who may be worried about some illness are free to manage their own risk by wearing protection instead of forcing such choices on others.
