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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 discourse is a product of the fact that people are starved for allowable avenues to express their suspicion about the political structure. Americans are using prompts in favor of eugenics and great replacement as a benchmark to see if their chatbots are well-aligned and truthful, they have built entire secular religions around racial grievances and are prohibited from recognizing them for what they are; these people are in a pretty bad place mentally.
Vaccine skepticism is, despite the best efforts of team progressive, very fitting with the general spirit of classical liberalism – my body my choice, the Man is holding the little men down, I'm entitled to believe whatever dumb bullshit I want, you don't get to dictate my epistemology – while satisfying the «elites are poisoning my precious bodily fluids» gut feeling prevalent among the growing fringe.
Just like Q (are we finally really over that psyop?), its proliferation is another discrediting self-own.
So in your opinion vaccine skepticism (specifically Covid vaccine skepticism) has the same truth value as a lunatic fringe theory like QAnon? That's certainly not a very nuanced position, even if you dressed it up in 3 paragraphs of text.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Covid vaccines, and the skepticism is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon.
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