[MBCook]

Thousands believe the vaccine implanted mind control chips.

Thousands believe the earth is flat.

Thousands believe their fillings send them person radio transmissions.

Don’t toss the baby out with the bath water. Would it have been better to let everyone die of Covid? Or get debilitating effects of long Covid?

This headline is unnecessarily alarmist.

[garfij]

> The officials each responded with “that very tired mantra: ‘But the virus is worse,’” Dr. Murphy recalled. “Yes, the virus is worse, but that doesn’t obviate doing research to make sure that there may be other options.”

[MBCook]

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be looked into.

I’m saying the headline overplays the danger and is the kind of irresponsible sensationalism that has lead to a massive increase in vaccine denialism.

[Jimmc414]

Do you believe that people who claim to be injured by a vaccine are lying or their perceived injuries are psychosomatic?

[MBCook]

Not all of them, no. There are going to be side effects or injuries for some people, that’s the unfortunate truth.

But some people are going to think that non-vaccine issues are due to the vaccine due to the proximity of the two events in time. Either issues they already had but hadn’t noticed before getting the vaccine, or total coincidences. Those need to be investigated too rule out possible issues. But even with an obvious explanation people may continue to blame the vaccine.

There are also the group of pseudoscience believers who will truly believe impossible things are the result of the vaccine and may work hard to make their “injury” known.

So I don’t like blindly taking the number of complaints, without even a cursory check for nonsense, and using it in a headline to make it sound like the vaccine’s danger is being covered up, without making it clear how small the percentage is.

Not everyone will file a complaint, true. So even if every complaint was true harm, more people would have been hurt. But billions of doses of the Covid vaccines have been given.

If 20,000 people were injured and “only” one billion doses were given that’s a 1:50,000 ratio. I don’t think the tone of the headline fits a ratio like that.

[cempaka]

The CICP has so far paid 11 people a total of about $30,000 for COVID vaccine injuries. One person who suffered myocarditis received a $1,000 payment. If anything, the headline's tone is understated relative to this state of affairs. If only 11 people had ever been seriously harmed by the vaccines, you never would have heard about it.