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Comment by ta988 | Hacker News Reader

And people wonder why others wouldn't trust federal instances with health recommendations during the pandemic. This is exactly this kind of stories that undermine the trust in those institutions, and these effects ripple far away in the future...

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The problem is that in the United States, you have a choice between placing your trust in public institutions that are constantly under assault by private firms, like Biogen... Or you have to trust those private firms.

I suppose in the medical field there's also a third party of snake oil supplement vendors, that don't even bother trying to measure whether or not what they are peddling actually cures anything.

The nice thing is that you don’t have to trust them. The data is out there and you can read it for yourself.

Very few people can read data for themselves. I certainly can’t.

I’m a highly qualified software engineer. I’m not a data scientist or an epidemiologist.

I work with some every smart data scientists. We occasionally discuss data topics outside their domain. They seem to hit a knowledge wall fairly quickly.

Please don’t ask unqualified individuals to “make their own calls” based on raw data they are not qualified to interpret.

I have to trust they audit the data, trial sites, manufacturing plants, etc… That’s sort of their job. If the people working there don’t want to do that job, they should probably be replaced.

This is not true, most of the data linked to an authorization for a drug are not public.

This comment has about as much thought put into it as those who dismiss vaccines outright. Are you really suggesting that every joe and Jane schmo out there read, interpret, and analyze a paper and come to conclusions themselves before trusting a treatment?

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