My belief is that covid-19 responses were over blown too. Particularly the long lasting effects on young children. American society is already struggling with healthy socialization. Now we have children with earliest impressions being that "others" are dangerous.

Sure covid-19 was a serious disease but it appears to me to be a tossup whether the lockdowns, loss of schooling, etc will cause as much or more long term damages. It may turn out to not be the case, but I believe interventions should have at least a 100-to-1 effectiveness to harm ratio. Most vaccines fall into this rang, or much lower. I severely doubt the responses will be near that rate.

I think people are bad at reasoning about sub-percentile or even sub 1-in-10 risks. During covid, on one hand you had people over-exaggerating pandemic risks due to hearing specialists like epidemiologists considering only the fallout of their field. It's hard to compare other small risks without hard work. On the other hand you get people over-exaggerating the risks of a vaccine because they hear of a few cases of bad reactions. It's hard to compare small risks without hard work.

Unfortunately, I think experts are almost more prone to that overestimation issue. Any individual school is still probably unlikely to have had a shooter incident. But a school safety expert would've seen many of them, leading to drills.

Sigh whatever happened to those libertarian floating countries?