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.
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.