It's lunacy to present your own subjective experience to an uninformed public full of vaccine skeptics who are looking to latch on to things like this as though this justifies their skepticism. If I have a bad but statistically-insignificant experience with a particular dentist, my impulse is not to caution others that such a thing could happen to them, because even though it
could, I have enough self-awareness and general care for society to know that it's a net negative to give people reason to fear the dentist more than they already do, especially because of something anomalous that happened to me. I hope the parallel is obvious enough.
Nope. I'm not outraged over anything. I do wish my fellow Americans and others would take a statistics class or two to learn about probability and how to responsibly handle and extrapolate from available data, but barring that, I would settle for just not having to read this ignorance dressed up as bold truth-telling here on CF in particular. But that's not going to happen either, so decide which you want: the ability to freely push science denial in the form of vaccine skepticism, or the privilege of never having to share a thread with someone who disagrees with you. Obviously, we can't have both.
I think it's a lot easier to assume that there's a lot of outrage coming from the anti-conspiracy side of this issue that shouldn't even have sides because obviously if there's one group of people who think they've stumbled upon some obscured 'truth' regarding why all this is
really happening or whatever, and another that tells that group that that's tinfoil hattery, it feeds into a somewhat natural in-group/out-group dynamic whereby those who are going against 'the official narrative' (i.e., recommendations that you get the vaccines, wash your hands, wear masks, don't cough into each others' mouths, etc.) feel themselves silenced or oppressed or whatever, and it's a lot easier to imagine that happening when the larger group is actively angry at you for
just trying to talk about this (!), rather than the reality that most people are tired of conspiracies and tantrums about "mah riiiights!" to go to Walmart without a mask at the height of lockdown, and all the other nonsense that we've seen infect society like its own type of virus over the past four years or so, and just want everyone to take the actual virus which is known to have killed several million people around the world so far as seriously as they apparently take Elon Musk's Twitter self-reporting of his own adverse reaction to the vaccine.
If anything is a cause for outrage, it's that the implication that 1,099,866 deaths in the USA alone is somehow of secondary importance to discussion/publicity of alleged Covid vaccine-related deaths, of which there have been reported to VAERS (which keep in mind is a
self-reporting tool, so in that way is actually comparable to Musk's tweeting) only 18,649 in the period from December 14, 2020 to January 11, 2023. When stacked up against the fact that over 600 million Covid vaccines were administered in that time, the percentage of deaths reported to VAERS is actually much, much lower than the overall death rate from Covid -- 0.0028% vs. 1.1%, respectively. (VAERS data comes from
the CDC; case-fatality ratio comes from the analysis done at
Johns Hopkins.)
But since you brought up exactly this phrasing, I think everyone
should be outraged that we're still discussing statistically insignificant self-reported events on top of a giant pile of elderly, immunocompromised, disabled, and/or conspiracy-ridden corpses. I'm just not. Not this many years on, anyway. Exasperated, concerned what this says about society, and overall wishing I'd never left the monastery back in 2014, sure, but not outraged.
I know better than to say anything about fields outside of mine (or even within my own) with 'absolute certainty', but I will say that this does not appear to be the new Thalidomide, no. To say nothing of the marketing of it ('Warp Speed'...nevermind that scientists have been working on treatments for coronaviruses since long ago), I see nothing particularly out of the ordinary with regard to the administration of or risks associated with the vaccines available for Covid-19, at least not in the USA (like most people, I treat the various proclamations of breakthroughs of this or that type which were made early on in countries like Russia and Gambia with what I think most people would reason is a healthy dose of skepticism, considering their sources).
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