[photochemsyn]

Based on the record of the pharmaceutical industry and their entirely captured regulatory agency, the FDA, it's not entirely unwise to wait about ten years after the introduction of a 'breakthrough drug' to see if it actually has negative side effects that were not discovered in the clinical trials. See Vioxx, etc.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534432/

> "Dr Graham, associate director in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, said an estimated 88,000 to 139,000 Americans had heart attacks and strokes as a result of taking rofecoxib. The number, he said, far exceeds earlier disasters such as the 100 children killed in the United States by an elixir of sulfanilamide in the 1930s and the 5,000 to 10,000 children born in the 1960s with birth defects related to thalidomide. Both events led to sweeping regulatory changes in the United States."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534432/

This is an unfortunate situation as relatively safe and effective medicines (i.e. Sars-CoV2 vaccines) end up mixed in with ineffective and even dangerous ones, and the public has no real way of distinguishing between them. As the whole opiate epidemic (driven by pharmaceutical corporations pushing their FDA-approved products via shady doctors and pill clinics) demonstrates, these outfits only care about profit margins, and since there are no criminal penalties and any fines are sure to be much less than their profits, they have no incentive to change their behavior.

[avgDev]

I just want to add some anecdotal evidence and what my experience has been like with a popular antibiotic. Cipro has wrecked my connective tissue and nervous system. This family of drugs has been around for a long time. The side effects have been discussed in medical studies for years. The drug has a black box warning label. Yet it gets prescribed very often against the current FDA recommendation to only be used for life threating infections. I have talked to top physicians in the US and they literally just ignore the problem like it doesn't exist. I have connected with physicians, chemists and other people with PhDs from all over the world who suffered the same. A pharmacists I know was called crazy by her colleagues when she said what happened to her.

My primary physician has stopped prescribing the medication, I send pages of research to him, which he probably didn't have time to read but it validated what is going on with me. He was surprised I actually took the covid vaccine, as not only did cipro screw me up but the whole medical community also completely ignored me and kept asking about anxiety. When I clearly had mechanical issues with tendons. They ran a bunch of tests and told me I was healthy.

Recently, Dr. Stefan Piper released a book on FQAD (flouroquinolone associated disability) and discussed pathogenesis, possible causes and therapies he has been using on hundreds of patients by now. He is an actual MD. From his experience a subset of people who are diagnosed with fibro, cfs developed it after taking the an fq antibiotic. Currently, there is no way to test for it. However, Mayo clinic is doing a study right now, to see if flouroquinolones are causing damage to mitochondria.

[pdonis]

> relatively safe and effective medicines (i.e. Sars-CoV2 vaccines)

By your own logic, we don't know this, because these vaccines haven't been in use long enough.

[hallway_monitor]

Exactly this. In this case it does seem like emergency speed was justified. However, every year over 1,500 drugs are pulled off the shelves because, like vioxx, they were discovered later to have terrible side effects. Maybe some of these would have been found with different study demographics. Maybe not. Drugs are dangerous.

[photochemsyn]

I personally went and got vaccinated the second month the Pfizer vaccine was released (but not the first) and even so I viewed myself more as a guinea pig in a clinical trial than anything else. As I had no immediate negative symptoms, I then got the second dose on schedule. Had some minor muscle stiffness in the arm after that one that persisted for a few months. I then got the booster when it came out, as at that point the data seemed pretty clear: side effects were minimal, and the risks of hospitalization and long Covid justified vaccination.

Notably however I certainly didn't expect that the vaccine wouldn't be 'sterilizing' and at the time the FDA was keeping quiet about the fact that vaccinated people could be asymptomatic carriers and spreaders of Sars-CoV2, which now seems widely accepted. The clinical data from the original trials has yet to be released as I understood it, and it likely showed that as well.

[WalterBright]

You may not have 10 years to wait if you're dying of some disease.

[TameAntelope]

You dying to a disease is nobody's fault (usually). You dying to a bad drug is arguably someone's fault, and I suppose there are probably not any number of documents you can sign that will completely abdicate the responsibility for your death from the corporation that created the chemical compound that resulted in your demise.

And probably for good reason? I really don't want to live in a society that gives people the ability to sign their life away so corporations can run scientific experiments on them that have a real chance of death.

I think there are some exceptions to this, but generally it makes sense to not let people go from "dying of a disease" to, "dying of a drug".

[WalterBright]

The proper, moral, and correct thing to do is to allow each individual to decide for themselves after being presented with the facts on the risks, probabilities, and benefits.

> I really don't want to live in a society

In a free country, you don't really have the moral authority to make such decisions for other people. After all, you aren't wearing their shoes.

[TameAntelope]

There is no moral way to let people decide for themselves if they want to be experimented on by pharmaceutical corporations.

In a free country, you absolutely have the moral authority (and imperative) to protect those who cannot protect themselves from being taken advantage of.

[refurb]

Hilarious how you say companies have entirely captured the regulatory role of the FDA.

Then you say look at Vioxx, which went through a full phase 3 study.

And then say “but don’t worry, Covid vaccines were know are safe”.

You’re contradicting yourself.