Always interesting to ask “who would benefit from this most” and that would be………… Pfizer! Their competitors can’t sell vaccines if they’re too late!

Of course, but I'd contend that regulation without oversight/checks and balances is tautological. Regulation in and of itself is the oversight, or the check and balance, and that responsibility is delegated to a specialised agency or department (that has a longer term scope than a single election cycle) rather than being directly managed by the administration in office at the time.

An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.

Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).

Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.

The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.

What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-vaccines-sav...

Has anyone died from Pfizer? I’ve seen cases of heart inflammation, but I haven’t heard of any deaths.

VAERS shows several thousand have died. Some estimate 45k based on a Harvard study on VAERS indicating a % that goes unreported.

Asbestos fire-proofing made a substantial difference. We did not - in fact - go from "Let's make things fire-proof with asbestos" to "Eh, asbestos is bad, guess everything will burn down instead" but instead moved to fire-proofing with new materials in countries that could afford to do that.

Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.

In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.

So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.

I am required to wear (chemical-infused) flame retardant clothing on oil and gas wells. Some people have to work despite the chemicals rubbing their skin all day.