People who expressed concerns or some doubts just a few months ago were attacked, downvoted, silenced and socially outcast.
This is not science. This is the opposite of science.
That did not make me any less scared of the "oooops" moment.
This will get worse (myocarditis today, menstural cycles tomorrow, maybe strokes and cancer later ?), then worse (vast number of people completely loosing faith into their docs and letting a much worse epidemy settle), then worse, before it gets... well, before life goes on and we mostly forget, as it has ever done and as we ever did, I suppose ?
Slowly, in carefully written form reviewed by people with the right training.
Unfortunately, in the middle of an emergency with the bodies of voting-aged people piling up... Not at all.
(Although, I guess not going to the other extreme of "having this conversation in bits of 140 characters among strangers with advertisers at each corner" did not help much.)
A lot of us have this inner "oh if only I was a better speaker / smarter / worked on my persuasion skills ..."
It's just not how power works. It's not how society works. I get that now, and it was amazing anthropology to see it unfold.
this is my favorite eric quote, which he also just applied to the ftx mess.
Eric's way of seeing things isn't a linear thing I can summarize, there's a few youtube vids you can search for the concepts of Kayfabe or his anger at the Consumer Price Index methodology which he's been making noise about for a decade, way before all the cool kids today tweeting about inflation.
It's about seeing narrative frames and language games that institutions play to intrinsically hide (to others and themselves) the mechanics of power/money.
He calls his own podcast The Portal because to see these patterns you need that moment where you step out of the calcified frame of current understanding, like in those kids books where youre stuck and drab and then find a magical portal to narnia, can return transformed.
(You have to have those moments yourself, it usually feels like a loss of innocence imo)
Further, it intellectually constricts the speaker, both in thought and speech. It's running a race with lead weights and straitjacket.
For a smaller, but longer-lasting example, think of how many times in the past six years you heard someone preface a statement with "I hate Trump, but". Those who lived under Communism and Nazism experienced the same thing: Anything that might be perceived by another as being against approved thought in any way had to uttered in a way that would plausibly insulate the speaker from undesirable consequences. Now, think of how long-term adherence to such behavior crabs the intellect and soul.
The nuance is key. Frankly, I don't recall much in the way of nuance, I pretty much always saw concern about vaccines framed as a battle for freedom against a tyrannical political party.
Which raises a lot of questions (is "being scared" enough of a justification for refusing a law ? On the other hands, do democraticaly elected officials automatically get the right do decide what people should be "scared" about, without having any more evidence than anyone else - given that the only thing that can give evidence is time, time, and more time ?)
Questions that, unfortunately, had to be answered hastly and withouth much concerns for the unlucky ones - which, to be honest, is pretty much the theme of history, and we have been among the lucky one until now, so maybe we don't have that much to complain about.
You don't understand why someone with concerns about the safety of a vaccine might frame the problem not as the existence of a vaccine with tradeoffs other people might want to make, but rather as a political party forcing the decision on everyone? Or are you just being disingenuous? Be better.
What is the scientifically acceptable way to phrase "I'm not concerned about BigPharma planting 5G chips in my future children's eyeballs to turn them into communist ; but I'm very concerned about blind spots during testing and biases in protocol and just plain bad luck that made us miss something ?"
Maybe I just write too much software for a living, but my only certitude was that something, somewhere, was going to break. At least I can TDD the hell out of my paranoia. Don't let me write health policy, ever.
Sidenode: if this kid had chosen the wrong profession in the wrong country, he would now be facing either "getting a couple of other shot" or "loosing its job".
If he had made a tiktok video about his problems, or a facebook post, or a twitter thread, etc... at some point it would have been flagged, and it would have only garnered the attention of the worst possible scammers.
And, worst of all, I'm pretty sure his grandmother would now refuse to get boosted.
Talk about loose-loose :/