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I agree that on the surface these numbers are not alarming. That said I trust that the government agencies know what they are doing here. If anything there is tremendous political pressure to NOT scrutinize the vaccines.

There is enough anti-vaccine & Covid rhetoric that we should all cool it a little bit and let the experts do their jobs.



> That said I trust that the government agencies know what they are doing here.

I’m the opposite. Covid caused my trust in them to plummet. Perhaps made with the best of intentions, but all the noble lies have eroded my trust.


They're letting perfect -- even a single death is too many -- get in the way of good -- a small number may have shitty outcomes, but the overwhelming majority will not.

Same framework that's lead to all of the poor policy decisions over the past year.


I generally agree with your comment, but

> That said I trust that the government agencies know what they are doing here.

If 2020 didn't finally shatter that trust, is there anything that can? FDA was already obviously a regulatory capture vehicle for pharma. And CDC got nearly everything wrong in the ebola outbreak of 2014. Then, both of them blundered their way through this pandemic.

For example, we know from the email leaks that FDA felt it was under pressure from Trump to approve vaccines[0], and then never disclosed this fact to the public. That doesn't seem like dispassionate science and expertise to me.

By contrast, many of the medical journals, preprint houses, and academic institutions have looked like far more stable sources of knowledge.

It seems to me that the internet age asks us to replace our state institutions of expertise with something more thoughtful and genuinely connected to science.

0: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n627




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