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Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.
The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.
You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.
It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.
The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).
We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.
Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.
Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.
*: not "you" personally; the general "you"
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it".
I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else.
There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).
But that's poor logic.
Those few instances are, by far, the exception. They're the ones you know about because they are so exceptional. But they are one in a million. Literally. Possibly even rarer.
And, frankly, your argument doesn't even hold up if they were more common. Because what's the common feature of those, that you yourself highlight? They were mocked. They were ignored. They were laughed at.
And yet, their ideas still caught on, because they were right. Only because they were right.
What this tells me is that, even if we do fully shut the cranks and the conspiracy theorists out of the scientific conversation, the one in a million (or hundred million) that actually find something real will get heard, because their ideas will prove to be right. They may not get credit for them—they might, instead, be credited to an actual scientist in the field who heard it two years later, from a friend of a friend of a friend with no clear attribution, tried it out, and found that it worked—but the truth will out.
I can add one even more pertinent example:
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/after-being-demoted-a...
A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.
The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.
The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.
Kids playing doctor with our country.
The average person doesn’t have the time or intellect to do this. This isn’t a realistic way for society to function. Trust is the most important thing for a public institution, and ours failed spectacularly there. Claiming the vaccine had a 99% efficacy, flip flopping on masks, etc. Massive hubris that should have been handled with a “here’s the best we know, but our confidence isn’t high enough to make definitive statements yet”.
Trust is a necessity. Without that there is no debating merits.
Well put
Like one specific polio-vaccine that very rarely can mutate into a contagious variant [0]. Or one vaccine for chickens that had some rather serious overall issues [1]. Or that some of the Covid-19 vaccines, hastily developed, were rejected by some countries, while other Covid-19 vaccines were accepted by those same countries.
And vaccines demand a huge amount of trust. Vaccines can be abused in lots of ways by governments, organizations and individuals [2]. This is extra unfortunate, considering the huge potential benefits of some variants of vaccines. Vaccines also require trust in competence and public control [3]. For urgency reasons, standards and checking of vaccines were lowered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are also often administered to healthy individuals, not merely sick individuals.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease
> Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek's is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
> The fact that the CIA organized a fake vaccination program in 2011 to help find Osama bin Laden is an additional cause of distrust.[120]
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight. They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.