Choose any site like https://covid19.healthdata.org/ where you can graph excess mortality, hospitalization and vaccination rates over time.
There are a few periods where 60-80% of various populations got vaccinated in the same month. The mass vaccination events aren’t followed by spikes in deaths or hospitalizations.
Som the vaccine is mostly fine, or there’s a big international conspiracy at play. Millions of deaths were somehow uncounted in public records. That’s a lot of missing coroner reports (and a lot of colluding coroners). What happened to the relatives, creditors, etc?
Who knows when every authority seems to have a vested interest in promoting vaccines no matter what.
* All actors are anti-rational (not just irrational, which leads sometimes to seemingly rational actions).
* There's something else pressuring them into taking an anti-rational decision.
I'd be surprised if it's the first, so I ask about the second. Unless the commenter means that killing your own citizens is in self-interest of the state, then leaving COVID run rampant would have been better option anyway.
To point an example, the FDA approved oxycodone for oral administration (and trusted patients with the dosage of a strong opioid). Meanwhile in most European countries it's rarely prescribed, and often only given IV/IM form (i.e. in the hospital).
Anecdotally, a typical post in "Expat in XXX" groups on FB involves Americans shocked that their medicine isn't approved abroad, and looking for alternatives.
So you take the exception to make a case? Around the world most regulatory bodies look at what the FDA has approved and take it from there to elaborate their own opinions. Oxycodone was an exception because it's an opoid and most countries knew better than to accept such classes of drugs because of well known experiences with such drugs in the past.
The literal Secretary-General of the UN said it was illegal[0], along with dozens of countries. You can't get more high profile disagreement than that, especially considering the rationale of the US was to enforce UN SCR 1441.
> Steele Dossier?
Sorry, not familiar with US politics.
Government cares about "looking" like they are doing the right thing. Because they want to get public support.
Then there is corruption. But I will say that's a secondary issue. Anyways, I am pretty sure once govt changes were I am from, former politicians will find a job easily in pharma. Again this is secondary and will always happen.
But maybe that's just me being unreasonable.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2021/03/15/politi...
** https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/26/how-the-ast...
*** https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/world/europe/europe-astra...
PERSON 1: Grotesque unsubstantiated claim!
PERSON 2: Uh... could you try to substantiate that?
PERSON 3: Like they'd ever leave any evidence behind!
Are seat belts a global conspiracy?
So, vaccines with unknown long term safety are the same as bike helmets, seat belts and food safety. Perfect analogies, thank you, you have clearly solved my concerns.
I.e. being fit and healthy will reduce the odds of a heart attack, but will never eliminate the possibility.
Assuming you are a software engineer. You know how sometimes a manager, layperson or junior says something like "Why are you making things so complicated by using git. We can just share the code on Dropbox?" Or maybe a student says "Why do arrays start at 0? It's so much simpler to start at 1." Well other professions have their own version of that situation. As a non-researcher it is not always going to be obvious why research methodology seems more complicated or specific than it needs to be.
If you want a control group I'd assume it's always better if it's randomized and similar to the non-control group.