And since you're here, why aren't you doing more to [flag/demote/whatever] content where people are saying that Covid booster shots and their requirements are nothing more than "petty tyrants wanting to control what others do."? Surely that's worse than a small attack on the person saying it?
Referring to authorities as "petty tyrants" or whatever probably doesn't count a personal attack unless the "petty tyrant" is personally present. I don't think those comments are very high quality, but this is the internet. Trying to raise comment quality is like trying to lift a tsunami. We do what we can.
I don't agree that personal attacks are "small". I think they are particularly poisonous to community.
I also think that if vaccine misinformation (which includes that vaccine requirements are just petty tyrants controlling people and not based in science, which is the root post here if you couldn't find it) isn't currently against the current guidelines, then that's an issue.
If Trump succeeded at gutting the FDA and installing people like Scott Atlas in order to override the career officials and experts at the FDA, or something similar, then yes my answer would likely be different.
Again, the POTUS at the time has nothing to do with the decision making.
For the unaware, there are multitudes of highly acclaimed scientists and academics around the world from top institutions including Nobel prize winners that are advising caution against the vaccine. You don't just get to choose which "science" you listen to. These voices are massively censored so the public doesn't really get to hear both sides of the argument. The whole "don't talk bad about the vaccine lest `vaccine hesitancy`" is evil and plain anti-science.
You also have to double check beyond headlines. For example, I saw people talking about how the FDA EUA panel wasn't a consensus for Pfizer 16+ back in the day. Turns out, most of the people who were hesitant just wanted to start with 18+, not 16+. That's a huge difference from what some of the headlines were saying.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...
That said, there is general consensus in the literature that the vaccines are mostly safe for adults in the short term. However for certain sub-populations (eg pediatrics and pregnant women) there isn't enough evidence yet from clinical trials and longitudinal studies to conclude with certainty that the benefits of compulsory mass vaccination outweigh the risks.
[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/
[2] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...
[3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016...
[4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/
[5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
[6] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
In fact, trying to do so for most on this forum would probably result in inaccurate views due to misunderstanding the articles and papers.
So people probably downvoted because you have a view on the subject, but no one is qualified to back or oppose it. And we don't know who you are, so how are we supposed to vet your view, or even begin to have a conversation about it?
I didn't downvote (or upvote), but that's my guess.
You desperately need to take a step back and look at yourself and how you evaluate things.
You decided to go against the booster because of your feelings, not because of science. You want government decisions to be guided by science, and yet you are very clearly anti-science with your decision making.
> To many of you here: imagine the Trump admin trying to require you to take the vaccine in November of last year.
What vaccine? There wasn't a vaccine available until Dec 14th 2020.
Are you trying to say if Trump actually cut corners and made the vaccine available earlier than we should have, then people would be mad? Well... duh. The difference is that the left generally follows what the leaders in the scientific community have to say, not the POTUS. The scientific community would have been against cutting corners.