“safe and effective” has a technical definition. This fact was abused by people in power.

I always said that the public health official must be absolutely certain they that all of the vaccines they were pushing are as safe and effective as they claimed before even considering mandating them. We now know they were wrong about at least one of them: the J&J vaccine is no longer being offered in my health system both because it's questionable safety profile and the fact that it is not as effective. Once we start preventing children from entering schools and removing people from their jobs (some with decades of experience) for not wanting to take a vaccine, the burden of proof is on the health officials to prove they are right. We also must remember that these measures have second order effects. I fear by abusing the trust the public had in physicians, public health officials have cause possibly permanent damage to the trust the average citizen has for the health community (this is especially pronounced among the underserved community).

public health is about trade offs.

a fast spreading pandemic vs. this or that public health measure.

the damage to the public health community is done not because of things like operation warpspeed, but because of the realpolitik of WHO, China, Trump, etc.

responsible participants have to take the time and effort to communicate with the correct framing: as new data comes in the best course of action can change, the current best is X, based on data D1, D2, ...

of course what ended up happening was random factoids sprinkled all over various media channels linked to local/state/federal/global decisions/recommendations.

government agencies are absolutely not up to the task of doing responsible communication to the public in this day and age.

> and the fact that it is not as effective.

Well, none delivered as promised. We went from "this will do it..." to "...get your booster boosted...and boosted..."

I get it. It's difficult to say. That's the true nature of science. The problem is, that level of honesty and transparency was completely abandoned. Instead we got "it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" which was yet another hyperbolic lie. Instead we got Fauci suggesting "wear two masks" instead of coming clean (i.e., those disposable masks didn't have any science to support their effectiveness. That is, they're useless*).

These are not opinions. These are facts. Yet we're in collective mass denial??

*Why didn't we already know this? And why isn't anyone asking why that was?

The anti-vaccination / bashing of anti-vaxx people was a pretty big and one sided internet niche pre-2020. In a way that you did have some tinfoil hat people, you had some whistleblowers, and you had an army of people bashing them left and right. And we're not even talking polio, but with stuff like chicken pox, where there was a vaccine introduced, but the folk solution (locking up the sick kids with the healthy kids so everybody gets over it) were at conflict that turned super, super vicious.

In a sense it was an already ongoing battle with every argument already deployed and pre-determined, but all of a sudden everybody and their grandma were involved in the conversation against their will. The perma-online people predictably took up the positions they did, while a plethora of other opinions / skepticism emerged but were all summarily heaped in the tinfoil hat. Now it seems to be unwinding, and it feels just as surreal as the last few hours of a rave where everybody is kind of sobering up and looking at a very bothersome way home.

Question: What do you call the pro-jab'ers that used lies and hyperbole to "scientifically" justify their position?

Not being troll-y or snarky. It's a legit question: Why was the self-proclaimed high road given a free pass on taking the low road?

There's been a clear and obvious double standard. Why has that lede been buried?