This worries me even more than a conspiracy, because people who are acting out of fear cannot consistently do good science or make rational decisions. When every government official, media outlet, and society at large is depending on scientists, doctors, and businesses to “fix” the pandemic so we can get back to business as usual, how strong are the incentive to cut corners or fudge some numbers if the ends justify the means? IMHO we are building lots of terrible incentive structures that are bound to blow up in our face.
The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover. You will feel like somebody ran you over with a truck. It's not fun, it's highly dangerous.
It can, but this isn't a given. Tens of millions of people get influenza yearly in the USA, and there's a wide range of estimates of asymptomatic cases, with 50% being a reasonable baseline to work from.
See, e.g. Seasonal Incidence of Symptomatic Influenza in the United States: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/66/10/1511/4682599
> Estimates of the percentage of influenza infections that are asymptomatic include a common approximation of 50% [33], 33% in 1 review [34] and 4%–28%, 0–100%, and 65%–85% in another review [35]. Both asymptomatic and symptomatic infections are captured in serological studies. The commonly cited “5%–20%” figure came from a serological study [5], and so represents both symptomatic and asymptomatic disease among a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons. If 50% of influenza were symptomatic, this would correspond to “2.5%–10%” with symptomatic disease, which is very similar to the range that we report.
I've had the flu, I'm sure nearly everyone has had it once. It's not really incredibly uncommon.
People do, but if you look at CDC estimates, tens of millions of people get influenza in any given year, so it's fairly like that any given adult individual has contracted influenza multiple times in their life.
Disease Burden of Influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
There are about 30 different COVID-19 vaccines around the world, with all kinds of different technology. There are inactivated vaccines, live-attenuated vaccines, viral vector vaccines, you name it. And then there are also nucleic acid vaccines, which deliver instructions to our cells, either as DNA or as mRNA. These aren't new, and they have been researched way before COVID-19. It's just that these vaccines save costs and time, which makes them good option for this pandemic. Do note that in less rich and developed countries, more of the other types of vaccines are being used. It's actually a luxury that we can have this type of vaccine and personally I am quite sure that this is the future of most vaccines anyway.
I'd want to move to that world, even if the government was nefarious. At least they're super competent.
I'm pretty sure that this is the future of vaccines anyway.