Hopefully some people will realise that all vaccines do entail risks, too
There was however a lot of skepticism and debate about the Covid vaccine because risk/reward is much more ambiguous.
That's just one of a myriad of conditions that cause paralysis.
What are "anti vax statistics"? Do you think people who refused to take the COVID vaccines were making up their own data from whole cloth? I never saw that. What we do see is that the stats presented by health authorities are often mangled by inappropriate methodologies that appear to be picked in order to arrive at pre-chosen outcomes. When the raw data is obtained and re-analyzed correctly, we get papers like this one:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239
"The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)."
In case you're the sort of person who evaluates arguments based on credentials not merit, the authors of this paper are all from universities or health services. One is an editor of the BMJ. One is a professional statistician and epidemiologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland)
You assert that the modern COVID anti-vax movement is "conspiracy driven". But there are two problems with this argument:
1. It's not really true. Refusal arises because public health officials have repeatedly lied about the vaccines, saying things like they are 95% effective against infection, or that they'll turn people into "dead ends" for the virus. That second one was the rationale for mandates and it was known to be false from the start - the trials never showed any such thing and they had no reason to believe this given that non-sterilizing vaccines are common. As for the first, the governments that publish actual case rates by vaccine status show that they have effectiveness in the minus 300-400% range i.e. vaccinated people get COVID at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people. So that wasn't true either.
2. Even if it was the case that it was all driven by conspiracy thinking, so what? It's already been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that public health leaders engaged in multiple conspiracies throughout COVID, e.g. virologists writing in private emails that they thought the virus looked like it'd been modified in a lab, and then days later signing an open letter saying the opposite. Or public health flipping from "masks are useless" to "masks are essential" overnight without any new science to drive it.
Given this history the argument that anyone proposing the existence of a conspiracy is illegitimate is, well, extremely naive.
"The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement"
The anti-vax movement existed from the very start. Research the history of the smallpox vaccine. Parents were choosing to go to prison for violating mandate laws rather than let their children be vaccinated because they'd seen that vaccinated children came down with actual smallpox at much higher rates than expected. Just like today, public health refused to countenance the possibility that there were any possible problems in the vaccination process. They never change. It's a psychological issue.
"You assert that the modern COVID anti-vax movement is "conspiracy driven" Where?
You pretty much just made up everything you say I said. I get it you had something you wanted to get off your chest so you dropped it on me. No worries.
Still, there's a secondary question here: how do we know polio vaccines are genuinely so different? COVID vaccines are one of the first mandatory vaccines to be developed and forced on people in the internet era. Thanks to that and the lawsuit that's forcing documents out of the FDA, the world has far more insight into the development and marketing of these vaccines than any previous public health campaign in history. What we see from this evidence is disturbing, and it seems to be a pattern, which raises the question of whether this is really the first time public health people have been misleading people about vaccine effectiveness and safety.
If it's not, then it becomes hard to say much with any certainty on the topic, as those sources control all the data.
Some guy in a lab coat wrote down he did a clinical trial somewhere in the 3rd world, and the government just takes his word for it. Then when you have a whistle blower like on the Pfizer trials, who claims patients were unblinded and side effects weren't accurately recorded, people just slap the old 'conspiracy' label on it.
Before 2021, most people didn't even know VAERS and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program even existed. Now the CDC is telling us the reporting system they manage is inaccurate. Okay, so what have they been doing for the last 40 years?
They finally admitted that the vaccines are affecting some women's cycles, but downplayed it by saying 'on average it's about 1 day shorter between cycles.' That doesn't sound like much, but many women have a very short window of time from conception to implantation before their period starts, and that would be more than enough time to render those women unable to carry a baby.
It's lunacy.
People discovering things because they start paying attention doesn't make them new.
Do you think VAERS functions adequately in this capacity? Which vaccines have had safety signals that lead to rescinding the license, or otherwise limiting use? Or is the FDA batting 1000?
VAERS is also important for monitoring the rotavirus vaccines - it was one of the data sources that pulled the RotaShield vaccine off the market due to increased risk of intussusception in 1999.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-vaers-covid-...
"Since CDC officials stated publicly that “COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring is the most robust in U.S. history,” I had assumed that at the very least, CDC officials were monitoring VAERS using the methods they described in a briefing document posted on the CDC website in January 2021 (and updated in February 2022, with minor changes) [PRRs]. I was wrong."
This had to be forced out of them with a FOIA request but their response to the request (for documents related to VAERS analysis of COVID vaccines) says:
"no PRRs were conducted by the CDC. Furthermore data mining is outside the the agencies purview, staff suggest you enquire with the FDA"
The CDC run VAERS but have never actually done any data mining on it, despite telling the public that the monitoring of COVID vaccines was the most robust in history. Which means that statement they gave is either a lie, or it's true and VAERS has actually never been used to detect safety signals.
There was a FOIA request a few years ago (can't remember the name of the organization, search engines have buried these type of results) that the agency in charge of post-license safety review of vaccines has never conducted a single review since the law passed in the 80s or early 90s.