> Lay people - including reporters - are really bad at teasing apart normal "how the sausage is made" from "there's an actual issue here", especially with anti-vax propagandists ready to leap on anything with even a hint of confusion.

Exactly this. Journalists and laypeople are specialists in making mountain out of molehills

But it's said when specialists also do that (with the suspension of the vaccine when the thing it is preventing has a 1000x chance of causing the same problem)