Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.

But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".

So, 3/4 vaccines went from safe to "clot shots" in just a few months.

That said they also lost track of or dropped 500-1000 people from that 40,000 sample.

Multiple people died over the course of the efficacy study for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, and yet they completed the study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.

You realize people die all the time? Even when participating in clinical trials?

Admitting past errors without also acknowledging the current knowledge is just as fallible is nothing but empty words. It's also a very rose tinted interpretation of what has been happening. The messaging has always been "These are this week's truths. They are absolute truths, and we'll enforce these truths at gunpoint, for these truths are infallible, and The Science is settled."

What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.

The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.

Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.

Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.

If this was some non-mandatory voulountary vaccine.. sure, test one thing, then another,.... If you were put in a position where you were effectively forced to get it (or else you'd eg. lose your job), such things should be tested first.