What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?
You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0].
I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming.
[0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...
What a world we live in where this is a reasonable statement to many.
Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities.
This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.
If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data.
I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.
Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.
And at the same time, it was obviously, provably known that the vaccine was better than covid. Did you know covid causes myocarditis too? More often than the vaccine does?
If your standard for informed consent is more information that was available for the covid vaccines then I assure you the other health decisions you are making in your life are not meeting that standard. You also aren't the best at evaluating risk. It's very much like being against seatbelt mandates because they sometimes cause injuries in car crashes.
Now it is a separate question of whether the current vaccine policy makes any sense, but its a much less impactful question because the policies from 2021 mostly did the job of protecting people.
The government has an interest in the overall public health and will make controversial decisions to that effect. They've done it before and will do it again. There were also right in this case so that is kind of important.
I agree they could have been wrong, and that would have sucked. But they weren't. The processes and safeguards to the very aggressive policies got to the correct endpoint, and saved a lot of people's lives (in some cases against their will).
The end result is irrelevant. It's the "she had an orgasm, so how could it be rape?" defense. The recipient must consent, and they must be in full possession of the facts for them to make that decision. Even if it is a decision you do not agree with, it is still theirs to make.
Remember also that if you get sick and go to an ER, they are required by law to treat you. The society has an interest in preserving this legally required service to be available to it's people.
You weep at the lack of informed consent for the vaccine but have no concern for the person who bleeds out in a car accident because the EMTs were overwhelmed with COVID patients who had completely preventable serious disease.
You don't want to take a measles vaccine due to the potential side effects (remember: nothing is perfectly safe), but yet want to live under the protection of everybody else who did take it.
If you choose to live in a society you gotta take one for the team every now and again. Sometimes the government is wrong and it sucks, but this was not one of those times!
I guess we fundamentally disagree on the need for informed consent. I believe that "you don't get to know that" is not acceptable, no matter how well-meaning people are. We used to sterilize people without telling them, under the exact same auspices (Buck vs. Bell). I quote Oliver Wendell Holmes "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."
So don't read about the side effects of anything you are prescribed, I would still like to.
Obviously the vaccines were not without risk, and when the government said they were "safe" that did not mean they were 100% safe... Nothing is. They were safe to the standards of other vaccines in broad use.
I will acknowledge that in addition to the known deaths from JNJ, I'm sure there were a bunch of unlucky people who had reactions to vaccine that caused issues or may have even killed a few people who were extra sensitive or unlucky. However if the choice is either getting the vaccine first or getting COVID first, and one is 100x safer than the other one for all of these side effects, then it's still hard to disagree with anything the government did.
And at the end of the day a lot of anti-vaxxers or vax-curious people argue in bad faith with bad data (I'm not saying you are, but it is common). And even I agree that the "good" data isn't perfect. We still have reporting issues of died with COVID vs died from COVID, but even with any reasonable assumptions about these distinctions the vaccines give all people of any age enough additional protection to be worth it (for the initial 3 doses at least - I make no claims beyond that).
(Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)
Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.
Objectively, with the rate of change and revelation surrounding the vaccine, I'm not sure how anyone can confidently assert that we know anything about it "for sure." We're learning new things about side effects and efficacy quite often at the moment.
Current data suggests that the virus is far more deadly for a certain segment of the population but there are significant negative health impacts for other segments of the population, while the feds and pharma are pushing even more vaccine use for demographics which have consistently shown low vulnerability.
There's simply too much nuance to make a blanket "we know for sure" statement about this. It's a living, evolving topic.
Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?
Curious, did this happen to you?