Except we’ve been studying this for well over a hundred years, and it’s not a medication, it’s only presenting something to the immune system so it can perform it’s singular task on.

So, by this point, you’re telling me I can’t understand what editing a cell in my excel spreadsheet will do without a huge test of hundreds or thousands of people all making the same edit to figure out if it’ll work.

We know it works. We know how it works. It works by handing the task to the immune system and getting the fuck out of the way.

Clinical trials are to assess if it works well enough to consider widespread use.

The claims that rare side effects have been well-characterized and can be predicted from the mechanism alone are simply not true - the FDA itself required further postmarketing studies (to be finished around 2023) as a requirement in their approval letter. The foundation of convincing people that taking the vaccine is safer than not taking it cannot be the false claim that the probabilities of each side effect are known, because they are not. Instead we should focus on the true claim that the virus is much more dangerous and also not completely characterized.

That’s absurd.

Yes, I still test my code.

But when I write it, I do it with the lessons I’ve learned over decades, and it’s usually close to working before the first test comes into the picture.

That’s where we are with vaccine production: we’ve been cranking them out for decades, and the process is so robust that failures at in the six plus nines range of outliers.

I think you might be overestimating the success rate of drug discovery and underestimating the complexity of the situation. Starting from 10,000 compounds chosen on the basis of reasonable mechanistic or chemical arguments, one or two working drugs are typically discovered.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Drug-discovery-and-devel...

Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target.

You’re building things from a library of tested techniques.

Vaccines aren’t drugs.

They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing.

We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible.

We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release.

That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.

A hypothesis still must precede a trial, and many hypotheses are formed based on an understanding of fundamental concepts/mechanisms and prior studies.

Studies are still required because a hypothesis is just that - a hypothesis - but I wouldn't completely dismiss a discussion of the mechanism, because this may still provide meaningful context and/or help form an initial understanding of risk before having real study results.

There are a few hypotheses suggested by the higher-count events in VAERS, as well as the standard ones checked in postmarket studies (effects on pregnant women and children in particular). I agree that the mechanism is a good way to do hypothesis generation, but it's not a solid argument for the safety of a treatment. It is really only an antidote to specific, hallucinatory claims, like the line about it "changing your DNA."