1. the sci/med establishment seems to have some ongoing ~bias issues that I don't fully understand when it comes to listening to and taking lay people seriously (especially women)

2. it's hard to do complex synthesis of relative risks and rewards across different studies measuring different things for different reasons

3. we've had a lot of uninformed and malicious actors splashing about in the information ecosystem

It's a two-way street. Researchers and public health officials both need to take women seriously and they need to have faith that they can research or discuss details like this frankly through their normal semi-public publication channels without people who don't grok or don't care about the nuance of their research using it as an info-cudgel to induce FUD that ruins lives.

To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.

The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.

That is to say that your sister may have experienced the same effects even if she had taken the booster.

I remember outright lies coming out of the WHO and governments regarding the usefulness of masks (out of a fear of running out of stock for health professionals), and regular exaggerations of the benefit of vaccines coming from politicians (at least in France), where they were drawing a stark black and white picture of a much more nuanced reality.

However, I don't remember seeing false epidemiological data coming out.

Ironically select ICUs report 90% of their cases are from fully vaccinated now.

Given that the vaccine is not 100% efficient, past a vaccination rate threshold, it is inevitable to see a majority of hospitalized people being vaccinated.

When the vaccine was first rolled out, official communication was indeed built around P(vaccinated|ICU) but they soon switched to P(ICU|vaccinated) when P(vaccinated) grew high enough to make the first figure misleading.

The tricky thing with this though is that, what if there is an unknown side effect due to lack of research that could have hurt the baby (how many years of research have boosters had?), and she didn't experience that side effect but unwittingly chose a different evil?

Until the vaccine kills more pregnant women than covid, it's not tricky. (Spoken, as before, as a selfish older brother who almost lost one of the few people who'll ever think I hung the stars.)

I wrote a little about this @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31208231

You also don't need to post flamewar comments or name-calling attacks of this sort—it actually weakens the case you'd prefer to strengthen. A reply like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32132621 does the job vastly better.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

"But human bodies are not anything like software dev" I hear you say. You're right. Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed.

If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.

Without trying to inflame the rhetoric in this discussion (I feel like HN is one of the few places that this is possible) – will this be your stance on new vaccines and medicines going forward?

"Potential unknown side effects" is a critique that can be levied against almost any medical approval process, but the FDA has had an excellent track record with vaccine safety over the last ~70 years.

Yeah, and they did this by going through a lot of detailed processes, study, and trial. Not by doing what was done in this case.

Reproductive toxicity was not studied. At vaccine rollouts, reproductive toxicity was only studied on rats, then about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women, after billions of doses were administered.

More generally, the control group was lost during the trials (they vaccinated the control group).

I don’t have time at the moment to dig up my sources again (I posted all the relevant studies in my previous comments over the past year), but I assume you won’t mind too much since you also didn’t provide evidence for your claim that corners weren’t cut.

> about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women

This one from January covered >2000 women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35051292/

> These findings indicate that male SARS-CoV-2 infection may be associated with a short-term decline in fertility and that COVID-19 vaccination does not impair fertility in either partner.

Happily Pfizer and Biontech have had extensive clinical trials ongoing for pregnant women since February 2021[2][3], and there was a preliminary analysis done across 35,691 recipients that had good findings[4]. It's something that regulators have paid a lot of attention to, with tens of thousands enrolled in the V-safe COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry.[5]

[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/global-regulators...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3547525/

[2] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

[3] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04754594

[4] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2104983

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vs...

1. More people in the vaccinated arm died than in the unvaccinated arm.

Effectiveness against death = negative. This was ignored because, they said, the difference was too small to be statistically significant. That's not a logical way to use the concept of statistical significance. What these results meant is that the vaccines might kill more people than they save, or it might be a statistical fluke. A normal person would expect such a result to drive demand for more data to resolve the question definitively, but that didn't happen and now heavily vaccinated countries have non-COVID excess death that started at the time of the rollout. The goal of the vaccines was to save lives but now people are dying of non-COVID causes at a greater rate than expected.

2. At least one of the deaths in the Pfizer trial was advertised as non-vaccine related even though it was.

Anonymized study subject C4591001 1162 11621327 was found dead in his apartment several days after taking the first dose, likely time of death was only one or two days after the first dose given that police were called due to a welfare check and his body was found cold. The coroner didn't know he was in a vaccine trial and ruled the death cardiac/arteriosclerosis related, no autopsy was done and this report was then presented as evidence that the death wasn't vaccine related despite the obvious temporal association.

3. No studies of the effects on pregnancy at all. This is normal and to protect babies.

Now we have the birthrate figures for the first quarter 9 months after the vaxx rollout reached mothers of childbearing age and they are down 15%-25% which is a huge difference, quite unprecedented. In Taiwan births are down 27%! So it looks a lot like the vaccines have trashed our already low fertility rates, which is a catastrophic outcome especially as they should never have been administered to women of that age to begin with (look at excess mortality by age for before the vaxx rollout, there's none under 45 for all of Europe and in some places like Sweden, none under 75).

3. The placebo arm received another vaccine, not saline as you would expect.

This is because the bad reactions would unblind people otherwise, so you have to give people something that will give them equally bad reactions. There are two problems with this: (a) the counter-factual in reality is not some random other vaccine but rather no vaccine at all, so they weren't testing against what would actually happen in the real world, and (b) although the trials are advertised as the pinnacle of scientific rationality there is absolutely nothing rational about the placebo effect. Think about it.

4. Cases of severe cardiac damage were fraudulently recorded.

Study subject C4591001 12312982, now known to be a 35 year old Argentinian lawyer named Augusto Roux, started to immediately feel unwell and developed a high fever on his way home after taking his second dose. A couple of days later he fainted and went to hospital where a CAT scan revealed heart inflammation; the doctor concluded vaccine damage. Augusto was told by nurses that there had been a huge influx of patients coming to the hospital from the trial. One nurse estimated maybe 300 people which would have been 10% of the patients from that part of the trial alone, which is why they were able to quickly identify the likely cause.

When he contacted the trial operators to inform them of his hospital visit they wrote down that it was not vaccine related, in contradiction to the diagnosis by the hospital, and that he'd been admitted for "bilateral pneumonia". Later on they updated the diagnosis to be COVID-19, which wasn't even then counted against vaccine effectiveness because he had a negative test.

Even worse, Roux appealed through the regulator to get the trial operators to unblind him (which they falsely claimed they could not do). Immediately before the appeal was due to be heard, the lead trial doctor (a pediatrician!) put in his trial record around the time of the regulatory appeal that Augusto was mentally ill, due to supposed "anxiety". No actual medical work was done to establish this fake diagnosis. It simply appeared.

https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/is-subject-12312982-the-ke...

Still not a good analogy, but perhaps closer to the case.

And if we go down this road hopefully it's sooner rather than later. The people responsible should have to live (or not) through the suck rather than having some yet unknown future generation be saddled with cleaning up the mess.

Real disasters always happen, but it happens to 'other' individuals, so no one is bothered.

We don’t know much about that either, to be fair.

I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in.

This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe.

I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.

It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly.

Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.

Also consider that it wasn't until the late 90's that the flu vaccine was approved for pregnant women and they were still worried about it. So we have the original adverse event studies post flu vaccine and compare them to post covid vaccine.

You are right, there are lots of confounds and interactions, we are careful to handle that properly. We're a bunch of nerds who don't have a dog in the political fight, we just want to show the data.

https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effec...

It seems very unintuitive but when you have these studies without a control they are shockingly biased… not due to anybody’s fault, just human nature.

Viruses are indeed mostly benign. Medical malpractice is a leading cause of death. In any case, it is not an either or. This vaccine does not prevent infection, the risk reduction for an otherwise healthy person, especially with the new variants and boosters, has never been established in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Yet, it is being recommended even to healthy children. You can hope and speculate that it has a benefit, but “the science” does not say so.

It doesn't exist, nor does anyone "in charge" want it to exist, or so it appears. The FDA waved through a trial for children with a sample size of about 1000, almost guaranteeing that a rare side effect like Myocarditis would not show up. That's a clear signal of regulatory capture, if you ask me.

The data that does show a benefit generally does not stratify across factors like age and risk factors, or if it does, extremely coarsely. That's, of course, misleading - perhaps intentionally so. In general, the paucity of meaningful data is just staggering.

Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too. Unless you think the over 50s are some sort of frog vs the younger tadpole.

Plenty more everywhere.

So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?

1) Belief in 'natural'. This has been a common marketing ploy since 'green' became a thing if not before. Of course the world we actually live in is entirely artificial - just as well as our 'natural' lives were nasty, brutish, and short.

2) Attempting to assert 'independence' or 'agency'. Again another marketing ploy, really we have very little agency or independence - however it is useful to make us believe we do and we should exercise it with our credit cards.

3) Attempting to be contrarian or a 'free thinker' in order to impress (ourselves? others?). Much much more humility is required before starting down that path.

4) Ideological/political propaganda/pressure from our peers. Belief systems have a tendency to become pathological when contained within a tightly delimited group. Probably this is a very great danger to our social discourse at present - though whether worse than before is unclear.

This sort of population-level data is bogus. The data is usually fudged in some way, for example by making it difficult to get counted as "vaccinated" after infection.

The source you quoted (at the end of '21) claimed a factor of 18x to 52x difference in hospitalization rate, but the current data has that down to a factor of 2.7x to 3.8x:

https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMTgwMzZlZWYtN2E0Ny0...

Did the vaccine really lose that much in potency? Do the boosters work at all? That data can't tell us and this is why we need trials.

> Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too.

We may expect that, but we can't know. We do know that the infection risk is massively lower in the younger age groups. We also know the risk for Myocarditis after vaccination is massively higher in the younger age groups, particularly in males. We don't know why that is, however. Remember, we're not just looking for a risk reduction for one particular disease that many people already had anyway, we're looking for a net benefit of further administrations.

> So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?

All irrelevant to the lack of scientific data. For you to cough up some "business insider" article tells me you haven't exactly followed the relevant publications (or lack thereof) either.

The effects of COVID are so extraordinarily age skewed that this inference doesn't hold.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/ten-thousand-report-me...

[Dutch Reference]: https://www.lareb.nl/news/veel-meldingen-menstruatiestoornis...

Edit: it’s pretty sad that there are people who have such an ingrained agenda that they have convinced themselves that, yes, this IS how a professional involved in a scientific public health study behaves.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/natality-dashboard.htm#

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/sweden-birthrate-update-m...

https://pasteboard.co/uhkdWFvhCf9c.png

edit: this showed up in my inbox during dinner - more evidence https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/new-data-from-germany-birt...

But yes, one way to answer that question definitively would be to do a cohort study on conception rates. Split the data by vaccine status. This can't be done because public health agencies systematically refuse to do this sort of study, nor do they expose the necessary raw data. They don't want anyone being able to answer these sorts of questions. Most data that is available has to be forced out via FOIA requests and the courts.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/aug/02/highereduc...

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/articl...

One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary.

There was nothing else that could have been done except fire the head of the CDC after their flip flop politics instead of science.

Except it was because by that time the horse was long out of the barn and the China ban failed spectacularly. cases were already here and also coming in from Europe. If it didn’t fail why did we get a Covid pandemic?

At that point what was needed was massive testing rather than the denialism the trump admin presented. And they failed massively at testing and public education.

It was literally everything else he did, and more importantly things he DIDN'T do that were terrible.

Remember that "smart people" warned Trump when he came in that this was something they expected for a while now, and that we had experienced very lucky outcomes in the close scares we had in the early 2000s. Obama warned Trump coming in to be ready for this. What was Trump's response to all these warnings from experts? He sold off the United State's strategic reserves of PPE to hucksters he knew that set up shell companies and fired all the "pandemic quick response" teams that had been set up by previous administrations

Presuming that the amount of time spent was necessary to thoroughly gather, review and document the findings, what would you have wanted done differently?

Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097

(lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)

I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does.

Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.

That's not easy, though. The temptation to lash out at users representing the majority view is really high (edit: especially when one notices them posting aggressively or with lazy arguments, which is always easy to do when speaking for a majority view). It looks to me like you're succumbing to that a bit—though not so much that we would moderate or ban you.

It's a hard problem. When people feel surrounded and picked on (and may be surrounded and picked on), they have a tendency to lose it (I'm not talking about you here) and go into fulmination, wake-up-sheeple rants, and so on. Then we moderate or ban them, because protecting the container is more important than rightness or wrongness on $topic. Inevitably they conclude that we banned them because of their views, which is usually not so. (I say 'usually' because nothing is 100% true about moderation and because there exist genuinely extreme cases, which have to be handled differently.)

Past explanations about this if anyone wants to read more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

edit - I read through the links you posted. My publicly stated concern was likely unfair and I apologize. I will be better.

Healthcare is a huge field, an orthopedic surgeon’s opinion for example should hardly matter over that of a virologist.

The fact that it comes out now tells you something went very wrong in the trials. In a functioning science, a careful postmortem of the vaccine trials would be in order.

1. It prevents birth defects from occurring with trial participants, because this product has not yet been fully studied and approved.

2. It reduces the initial knowledge of any female-specific issues with the product, and particularly limits knowledge around pregnancy issues.

https://www.path.org/articles/why-are-pregnant-people-left-o...

Then of course, menstruation age and pregnant women should not be told the vaccine is safe for them, as it was never tested on them. Similar to other pharmaceuticals, it should only be recommend after very careful consideration.

For example, the Tick-Borne Encephalitis Vaccine has a track record of decades, but still, the recommendation in pregnancy is [1] "The vaccine appears to be safe during pregnancy, but because of insufficient data the vaccine is only recommended during pregnancy and breastfeeding when it is considered urgent to achieve protection against TBE infection and after careful consideration of risks versus benefits."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis_vaccin...

that's false.

When these problems were first reported, resolve to stick with the principle of informed consent rather than impose mandates.

[1] https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 (Good Morning America and ABC News talking about menstruation side effects 5 months ago and basically saying the opposite of this study)

I'm no anti-vaxxer, but that trips my BS alert bigtime. All I hear is "duck and cover".

I (a male) have always been super horny ever since I hit puberty. I woke up nearly every morning with an erection as long as I can remember. I’ve never had problems with erections with my wife.

I got the first Pfizer vaccine last year when it became available. The next time I was intimate with my wife, I lost my erection during sex - the first time it has ever happened in my life. “Normal” side effect they said.

Things got a little better so I was encouraged. I got the second vaccine as scheduled. The next two times we had sex I completely lost my erection during sex.

I’ve been searching to see if other men have had the same problem but either I am the only one, or everyone just sweeps it under the rug.

It’s been almost a year and I rarely have random erections. I thankfully don’t lose erections during sex, but I am no longer horny. I used to be the one to initiate sex through our marriage but now my wife usually does. My sex life has taken a huge hit since getting the vaccines. Of course I can’t blame the vaccines, but you will not be able to convince me that this is a coincidence.

The reason I am writing this is in case there are other men like me who think they are the only ones, because anyone who even thinks the vaccine could cause problems gets labeled an anti-vaxxer nut job. I was pro vaccine (I got my series right away) and still think the vaccine is important, but I think it’s a shame that no one is “allowed” to talk about side effects.

This is my anecdotal story.

Stress, eating different food, eating foods at different times, gaining a couple pounds, losing a couple pounds, getting sick, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, etc etc etc.

The menstrual cycle is often a very sensitive system, and one I would argue most people are very unfamiliar with.

I get that it's a sensitive system and it can be affected by a lot of benign factors. But if you don't know why your car is misfiring, how can you say with 100% certainty that there's not an issue with the engine?

It was still the correct choice of action for you to get the vaccine and potentially delay conception. It is safer for you and the baby if you are vaccinated.

This study is just providing confirmation to something that all medical professionals likely assumed is true, based on the common knowledge that the flu and cold and other illnesses can also affect fertility.

Correct? To… delay conception? According to… you?

I am not comfortable leaving decisions like that to others.

The prevailing theory, at least at the time, was that widespread vaccination would reduce spread and protect everyone including the unvaccinated.

In that case, it could make sense to force people to delay if it means everyone ends up better off overall.

I know you didn't mean this the way it sounded. I know you are probably well educated and think your choices are obvious. I will only state that I have very strong feelings towards someone who tries to force a decision like this on someone else.

I did - nothing personal obviously, but the problem is that ultimately no matter which side you pick you will have tradeoffs that some people will agree with and some who'd suffer disastrously as a result - just like the flip-side (assuming the initial theory is correct) could potentially involve a lot more deaths and cause just as much grief to families/etc.

Of course in retrospect the point is moot because in practice the majority of countries mismanaged their Covid response and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - the negative effects of lockdowns/mandates/etc without them being followed/enforced enough to actually have any significant effect at eradicating the disease.

Again, no offense intended (and you have the right to be angry), just trying to explain the other side of the debate; there's a tradeoff to be made and either side will have downsides (though IMO in retrospect neither was enforced well enough and as a result we ended up with the worst of both sides without any of the benefits). Ideally there would just never have been a virus and then we wouldn't have to think about these trade-offs at all, but now that it appeared, those decisions had to be made, rightly or wrongly.

Do you actually know this to be true?

But then, they probably thinks it's true regardless.

Turns out the public really doesn't like it when you treat them as idiots and the former group reaped what they sowed.

Long in the future, when people can admit they are wrong, we will look back on this period with disgust. But, for now, carry on everyone - just a few more people banned and finally we can stop the spread.

My informed guess would be that the nanoparticles combine with HDL/LDL in the blood stream, and end up in the cells that consume these, but this is speculation.

This would end up disrupting the ovarian endocrine cells (cholesterol is the chemical precursor of sex hormones), which can regenerate once the RNA and its product has been eliminated. The future egg cells should not be affected (and AFAIK the ovarian reserve is not damaged by the COVID vaccines), and neither is sperm production.

It's hard to blame them for not spending a ton of time before approving the vaccine considering safe changes to menstruation when they were working to do something about the dead bodies which were piling up so quickly they had to be stacked into semi trailers and dumped into mass graves. People were dying in vast numbers and we needed something safe and effective at preventing those deaths and the vaccines were exactly that. Safe and effective.

Obviously, they were very much concerned with pregnancy and miscarriage. A vaccine that makes people infertile or causes them to miscarry would never have been approved, but it's pretty reasonable that every possible impact wouldn't be noticed and deeply studied before getting it out to people.

Especially those side effects that only impact women since women (especially pregnant women) tend to be underrepresented since they're much more hesitant to enter drug trials in the first place leading to limited data. You can't blame the women for that. If it's unknown if a drug has a negative impact on fertility signing up to try it out on your body or your baby is taking a huge risk. The FDA's policy used to be to exclude women from the earliest trials to protect them for this reason, but that too caused problems to be missed. Adding women in early means it's more likely that a problem that affects only a small percentage of women will be caught, but there are no certainties.

For what it's worth, the menstruation issue wasn't ignored by science either. Covid infection also causes changes to menstruation and there was some evidence and concerns that infections may impact fertility in some cases. All of this has been looked into as reports came in. That's the process working. Vaccines are shown to be likely safe so they go out to the public, then doctors and patients continue to report issues that arise to gather data on side effects.

Some early papers about the impact of the vaccines on women (and pregnancies) include:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102845592...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v...

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6....

https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_A...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v...

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1

There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications.

We've heard from 2 local people in our small community who had family members die within 24 hours of vaccination. They were afraid to talk about it because of the blow back that came from anyone mentioning complications. A scary side of a lot of people came out and it's permanently affected my perception of a great many.

Maybe there was a male bias in the clinical trials, but I have a hard time believing any information about complications would have been released or accepted at that time.

Except when it came to people who were pregnant or hoping to get pregnant. There was relatively open discussion of the potential health impacts in those situations because those were not well understood due to the previously mentioned bias.

The general consensus at the time was to get the vaccine, because the thought was that any side effects would be less severe than potentially getting Covid without that extra protection. But those recommendations usually came with a lot more “discuss it with your doctor” disclaimers than the overall “just get it” recommendations for the rest of the population who wasn’t thinking about pregnancies.

That slight reservation shows that it wasn’t just a huge coverup to get people vaxxed. It was a genuine lack of knowledge because of how these medicines are almost always tested.