Ok so here is the crux of the argument you and Tibs willfully gloss over….
there is a rigid set of controlled, escalating clinical tests that have to be passed before a medicine or medication regimen is fully approved for use in this country…
the more novice the method the medicine employs, the more initial testing they do to rule out various issues, both short term and long term . The CDC has for years had this and other info openly on its website.
despite the rigorous testing products do occasionally slip through with bad side effects. Sometimes this is because of unforeseen complications with other medications, others because an effect simply wasn’t looked or tested for in the clinical trials, and more than just a few times a pharmaceutical company actually lied about clinical result data…
For this reason they implemented things like the vaers system , which is supposed to track every bad effect seen after a vaccine. When any serious effect shows even mild correlation between the vaccine and the symptoms, or anything shows up as a manufacturing issue, they temporarily halt the vaccine and require new testing or inspection.
if the issue persists then the product is discontinued or restricted….
this has happened probably a dozen times for approved vaccines through the past 25 years… most issues were proven not related to a vaccine and were put back in use
a handful were permanently pulled from the market
bear in mind though, hundreds if not thousands of potential vaccines failed in clinical trials and were never released….
these particular vaccines were given emergency status, which made sense at the time
however this meant they didn’t get the extended clinical testing that a novel treatment required… therefore the chance of serious long term effects is greatly increased… timeframes for typical approval have been listed on the cdc site for well over a decade… it’s typically 1-10 years phase 1, 2-4 phase 2, and 2-4 phase 3 iirc…. Newer methods tend to lean on the longer side of those to determine long term effects and what medications they can be mixed with..
moreover the vaers system did uncover serious correlations between heart issues, pregnancy issues, paralysis, strokes, sudden death and a few more that are serious enough and in the sufficient numbers that in every other case, the product would be temporarily pulled for further testing by older precedents… here they had a brief pause on J&J over the minor stroke issue… and while they acknowledge some of the other issues they are not pulling them….
and we have no assurances that in two or three more years these aren’t going to cause cancer, or birth defects, or organ damage… or any of the dozens of serious long term effects that derail treatments in longer clinical trials all the time…
so we know that the vaccines we are using aren’t “perfect” as in they don’t end the viral spread… and while we know that short term they do reduce severity, we don’t know what the long term effects are … so we don’t really know if we are saving lives or ultimately dooming them… that's why it has to be a personal choice…