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A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?
I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.
Excuse me for laughing here, but the whole discourse around the vaccine(s) and health risks now showing up is just an impossible situation. People have been complaining that the FDA were foot-dragging on useful drugs and that we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk. Then the vaccines were pushed through fast and everyone said this was good and sensible and should be the way things work.
And now there are complaints of "too fast! too risky! not enough tests! Big Pharma only interested in profits! The experts should have held up the process until it was all accounted for!"
So do we want fast but risky, or slow but sure, and whatever decision happened, there would be criticism about the effects on the health of the general public (e.g. if the vaccines had been trialled the usual way, "millions will die that could be avoided by simple vaccination programme, vaccination is a long-established practice that has been proven to be safe, what is the hold-up?")
I'm not saying The Experts were flawless, but the public is fickle.
The public is, unsurprisingly, vast and contains multitudes.
I think the bulk of criticism is coming from never-vaxxers justifying their own stances rather than regrets from those who complied. In the mainstream, political affiliation is quite predictive of whether someone will excoriate the FDA. Honestly, that’s probably true here, too; people are just more likely to dig up actual evidence for whatever stance they picked back in 2020.
If Scott flips and says “maybe I shouldn’t have been a principled libertarian, just this once,” then I’ll be worried.
I honestly think whatever the FDA did, someone would complain. It's been three years and counting now, and Covid outbreaks and new variants are still flaring up. I think if the various world governments had not taken the path they did, there would be articles and social media posts about "if only the government had made vaccination mandatory for groups X, Y and Z, we'd have beaten the virus and it wouldn't still be a problem now!"
Nobody has a crystal ball, that's the problem. What would have worked, could have worked, might have been - nobody knows.
I do agree there was a lot of heavy-handed and contradictory messaging - the whole "no you can't go to church, you will spread a deadly virus but yes you can protest in the streets because racism is more of a threat than the deadly virus" shilly-shallying, for one.
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