Exactly my point. MD's are not trained nor qualified to deal with this stuff at a research level, never mind a construction or engineering type... they just think they're smart so they can figure it out and that's good enough. They're smart enough to convince themselves there's a conspiracy theory at work, or something they "feel" is wrong, or that they don't trust (again, a feeling). The labs full of the research scientists that do this shit day in day out for a living are behind it. That's good enough for me.
Sorry, I'm going to push back here. Someone with an IQ high enough to get an MD or a master's in engineering is, intellectually, more than qualified to read an abstract on a study and dig into the methodology that they list. Can they do a deep dive into the minutiae of how the protein receptors are binding to the cell walls of a virus? Maybe, maybe not. But if your argument is that only people with IQs of +140 who have at least 20 years of field specific research under their belt get to have an opinion and the rest of us should fall in line...I disagree. It also doesn't bear out why someone like Bret Weinstein - who has an IQ of +140 and over 20 years of field research on viruses in bats, to and including a PhD in that subject - is shadow banned and demonetized for merely questioning what he reads. And this is a guy who says over and over that Covid is more dangerous than people are being led to believe and takes it extremely seriously. There's whatever the "truth" of the science is, and then there's the political agenda.
It can be even simpler. What would the incentive be for everyone to be wrong about it? Sure, the pharma companies are benefiting handsomely, but they still answer to shareholders. I don’t think the stocks would be positively impacted if there were a large percentage of complications or deaths. Its literally in no one’s best interest.
And there, you've gone full Dunning Kreuger. No, a smart engineer can't figure this shit out in his den at home after hours. No, MD's do not have the time to dig into the avalanche of information on this shit as it happens. They only think they can. Being smart has fuck all to do with it... being properly trained, and actively working in the field is everything. I would put a lab intern at a current COVID research lab up against anyone you just mentioned and that intern would wipe the floor with them. And it's not just in this field... it's any field. I see it all the time in my own industry... super smart people get an ego, come in and figure they can figure shit out, then crash and burn by getting simple shit wrong.... because a lot of times, that "obvious" or "simple shit" is counter-intuitive, and it takes real-world experience and practice and failure and iteration to properly learn how shit works. You can't just step in from the outside and expect to have that benefit.
May I refer you to the opioid crisis. If there's massive short-term profits to be had at the expense of years-long health issues and deaths, profit will win. That's my cynical opinion.
Opiates are an addictive and high-profit-margin drug. It's a golden goose of a revenue stream. Vaccines are the opposite of that.
Opiods, smoking, drinking, etc, all pale in comparison to COVID. Hell, I'd say you can't compare. If you're thinking that the opiod issues is even the same context as COVID, not sure what to say.
They're not physically addictive, but it's a situation where every single person on the planet is required to have at least two of them and, it would appear, yearly boosters going forward. This is also a high-profit-margin-golden-goose scenario. It's a pharma exec's wet dream, in fact, because you don't have the nasty dark side of drug addiction running parallel with what you're selling. Juice's point (I think) was that the risk of bad press to the stock price should the Pharma claims prove to be false ought to be enough of a brake to inhibit shenanigans when it comes to reporting or detecting safety and efficacy issues with the vaccine. I brought up the opioid crisis because it's an example where Pharma knew what they were doing and still went after the profit rather than acting in the best interest of shareholders or public safety. If you think that the powers that be are different between the vaccine and the opioids...again, I disagree. Also, not for nothing but in Canada in the last year there have been 1,789 people who have died from/with Covid under the age of 60. In just 2020 alone, there were 6,214. Depending on your perspective, heroin is a way bigger threat to the majority of people (everyone under 60) than Covid is.
Historically vaccines have been a very low margin endeavor, to the point where some governments actually have to force companies to keep producing them. COVID vaccines were also a significant capital risk because they had to ramp up manufacturing before even knowing if the things would pass trials. Even if boosters become an annual thing, that's a once yearly purchase at a measly $40 a pop, and for something that is much more difficult to manufacture and transport than opiates. Compare that to opiate addicts who might be taking a half dozen or more pills per day.
No they can’t. Yes someone smart enough to get a decent mcat score and become an MD is quite intelligent. But I know the people who study for their PhD’s in stuff like this and MD’s alone, unless they’ve done a lot of their own research and published, are not qualified to read a massive study on a vaccine. There’s a huge difference between someone with an MD/PhD who spent the better part of a decade to learn one or two things as deeply as possible, and someone who went to med school and spent a few extra years becoming an ER doc or a pediatrician. I’m no knocking their professions at all as they are highly respected. But what they actually learn is worlds different than a PHD scientist. It’s the same reason you don’t go to a family medicine doctor for psych help.
Pharma execs are more excited about the potential stuff the MRNA vaccine tech, the funding and the changes to the review process this situation has unlocked. Again, the check from this endeavor has already been cashed and spent. Depending on how liability for issues is handled, there's a decent chance some companies lose money on these deals and will need to offset that risk onto future revenue streams. Using heroin is a choice that until a point of no return only affects you. You can't inadvertently infect hundreds of people at a wedding or a baseball game with heroin addiction. The people who do propogate heroin addiction? Criminals, usually. Not to mention the difference between dying of heroin overdose, and slowly dying an excruciating death from COVID. This is why perspective matters a lot: the professionals in public health understand not all deaths are the same, and they are not prevented in the same ways.
Despite what many might think, MDs actually get extremely little exposure to the mechanisms of disease process or immunology. Yes, a good MD will be more qualified than most to read a scientific paper on the topic, because familiarity with scientific papers is foundational in your ability to process and understand one, especially when it comes to the statistical aspects of the paper. But that does not mean that an MD is going to be qualified to judge the content or the quality of the research. MDs may specialize in research areas, and so some MDs will absolutely be qualified there, but most will not be - and most do not understand cellular disease process or the pathways involved more than your average in-school masters student. Let alone a PhD in the area, not to mention the PhDs in this area who have a decade+ of specific training and experience on this topic alone, who were the ones writing these papers. Smart does not qualify someone to judge specialized research like this. Smart is literally the bare minimum for the people doing this research before they gain the experience and education necessary to understand their field of study. Frankly, all-too-often people prove themselves to be less smart than they think by believing that they're capable of understanding and judging fields so far out of their expertise.
What about them? Those short-term profits are largely offset by an 11-figure lawsuit that J&J was the subject of and and a separate enormous lawsuit Pfizer that was. As for Moderna, the COVID vaccine is the only product they have on the market currently. This doesn’t even account for the multi-billion dollar cost to simply bring a drug to market. That aside, opioids still have a viable and medically acceptable place in treatment protocols. My wife was given fentanyl as an epidural when she gave birth to our son. She’s not a drug addict, at least not that I’m aware.
There's a circle-jerk of self-importance going on here. In no other facet of our lives do we say something like, "Only the smartest people in the world who have specific training for at least a decade are allowed to have an opinion, and we should all fall in line and not question what they say." If an average doctor or engineer can, in fact, be too stupid and/or untrained to figure this out, then a big chunk of scientists can also be too stupid or underqualified to have an opinion, even if they're cogs in the labs that are producing this shit. What's the plan...do we make people submit their CV to a public website and then have their peers (only their peers!) rank their credentials and only then allow those select people who make it through to speak about vaccines? Would you exercise that level of outsourcing for all your other healthcare and life needs? Do you blindly trust the person with the highest credentials? How do we determine who is the "best" person? I look at my industry, and the guy with the most education might not have the most experience. The guy with the most experience might have standing in the union, but he may not be the most qualified person for the job. There's levels of expertise in ANY profession, and I don't know that one needs to be a microbiologist to see that there are gaps in the messaging as well as an incomplete understanding of the science. Also, again, we're talking health care. Ultimately the individual gets to decide what they will or will not subject themselves to. Bear with me for a minute...my mother is currently having a really rough time with one of her ankles. Old childhood injury coming home to roost. We've been dealing with her primary care physician, who in turn recommended a specialist. Both doctors conflict with what the chiropractor thinks. We're subsequently going to Michigan next week to illicit the advise of another ankle specialist. All three doctors will present us with their professional opinions about what direction to take, and she'll have to decide which option she's most comfortable pursuing. There's every possibility that all three doctors will each have a different opinion. All are qualified "enough" that neither she nor I will do a particularly deep dive into trying to figure out which one is smarter than the other. We'll hear them all out and pick the option that makes the most sense for her lifestyle and seems to answer all of her health questions the best. That is how every heathcare decision should be made, IMO. It shouldn't be the state holding a gun to your head saying, "Do this or you're now in a caste system." One doesn't need to be a virologist to have agency over what goes into their body, and threat of job loss or being cut off from public services simply for deciding a thing for yourself is an incorrect policy. It's also not going to work in the long term, because as I said earlier...this is not going away. We have to find a way for everyone to live with Covid, because we cannot eradicate it. Even if one country managed, they'd have to shut down all borders and trade to sustain it.
We do it all the time, it just goes uncommented on because no one has politicized it. For example when was the last time someone threw a bitchfit over the regulations for building in a seismically active zone, and picketed the university seismology department with signs that said "P-wave? More like pussy-wave! Don't live in fear of collapsed buildings!"
Maybe you've never had to deal with the City with regards to getting a building permit. Also, in your example, some small group of engineers somewhere who sit on a board of directors come up with an equation, and then they use that forever without question until something collapses. If you're advocating for that method here...
Oh is that what my friend was doing when he spent all of quarantine burying monitoring devices over the Wasatch Fault?
They're qualified to recommend a course of action. Your mechanical engineering friend is not. Or did you ask him what he recommends for your mom's ankle? Your MD friend is not qualified. Yes, we should only trust people who are experts in the field. Not one expert. Not one specific opinion. Not one specific paper or research facility. The Experts. There are a lot of them. They come up with general scientific consensus all the time. We use that consensus all the time. The consensus changes and shifts over time as new data presents itself. But in no case do I say, "hey Steve, you're really amazing at doing low-level C++ programming for embedded devices, and you have your masters in robotics engineering. What do you think of this Moderna vaccine?" Because Steve may as well be a fucking moron when it comes to immunology.
Perhaps we've been miscommunicating this entire time...I'm not advocating that Steve from accounting be given equal say in how to develop the vaccine. I'm saying two separate things: 1. Amongst the experts in virology, I see a trend where anyone who questions what the government is recommending is immediately disregarded, and faces a real risk of being fully deplatformed. Certainly, they'll be demonitized. This is even if they espouse that Covid is highly dangerous and vaccines are wonderful tools. Having seen this play out at the same time that our understanding of the virus and the vaccine are evolving, and more often than not seeing that the people who were demonized were proven somewhat accurate in their predictions or questioning, I have empathy for people who reject the establishment in whole. 2. When it comes to what you ingest, the individual reigns supreme. Even if that individual has low IQ and imperfect understanding of medicine. And there shouldn't be strong-arm tactics to force or compel compliance. If someone waved a wand and I found myself in charge of Canada, I would proceed under the assumptions that Covid will be around long-term, with constantly evolving variants and that we will soon hit the glass ceiling of those who are willing to be vaccinated.