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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.
If they had actually tested it swiftly and effectively, I'd have fewer problems with it.
They developed the vaccine in April, then they were testing it all the way to November. But the actual testing they did was with extremely small sample sizes, against early versions of COVID. How could they have discovered the heart condition issue with a few hundred people? And they had to be aware that the virus was mutating, that every day they waited the effectiveness of their vaccine was declining. So we get a semi-obsolete vaccine with moderately severe side effects. This is not a good outcome.
I would've preferred if they tested quickly and effectively, vaccinating people and then infecting them with COVID in human challenge trials. I'm confident you could get tens of thousands of volunteers if you offered a cash payment. Or put 0.1% of the media firepower devoted to fear campaigns and demonizing people who go outside into praising the brave volunteers. Large sample sizes would let you find the heart issues as opposed to discovering them after mass vaccination had begun, when it was too late to turn back without extreme embarrassment.
The vaccines weren't pushed through fast and they weren't adequately tested. Then they were mandated anyway, including for those who face very little risk from COVID like young people with no comorbidities like obesity or lung conditions.
February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)
It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.
I was actually thinking of Pfizer which started trials in April but your point stands - Feb for Moderna. I suppose it was too broad and an oversimplification to talk about 'the vaccine' when there were several.
The delay issue is also very serious, I agree.
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