[bettercaust]

> For example: most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo like water, and will only be approved as safe if it doesn't cause more problems than the placebo does. This isn't what happens. The "placebo" in vaccine trials is usually another vaccine.

First, please consider from where and whom you received this information. It was probably RFK Jr. or someone on social media or maybe a news article, right? Did you bother to scrutinize that information? Because it's not true. All vaccines (like other medications) are tested against the standard of care. For a first-in-class vaccine, that's going to be a saline placebo because there is no standard of care yet; for subsequent vaccines, it will whatever is the current vaccine. This is completely sensible. The idea that the vaccines on the market now were never tested against saline placebo is mis/disinformation promulgated by a lawyer whose name escapes me; some of those saline placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are listed [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pUMNBewb0kgTU7g3augmOtPG...).

If you have a passing understanding of common anti-vaxx talking points, RFK Jr.'s arguments are easy to debunk.

[mike_hearn]

> it's not true ... [the placebo] will be whatever is the current vaccine. This is completely sensible ... [it] is mis/disinformation

Or rephrased, "that's not happening and it's good that it is". This kind of thing is called the Law Of Salutary Contradiction [1] and originates in confused, ideological thinking. If you want to argue with RFK Jr about something you need to decide if what he's saying isn't true, or if it is true but you disagree it's a problem. You can't pick both.

The "first in class" approach isn't illogical but it's an ultra-high risk strategy. If just one unsafe vaccine gets through the systerm that will lead to a chain of erroneous approvals that result in dangerous substances being labelled as safe. In other words it only seems completely sensible if you have absolute and total faith in the entire testing and regulatory infrastructure. Anyone who lacks your iron-clad faith will view this practice as obviously crazy.

Given that the medical profession have routinely lied as a group about many things in the past, it is unreasonable to use practices that demand quasi-religious faith in them. They refused to accept this and are now paying the price.

[1] https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-g...

[const_cast]

There's multiple problems here:

1. We used known safe and effective vaccines as placebos. Keyword KNOWN. We're not gonna debate the efficacy of the fucking polio vaccine, just be for real.

2. The reason we do this is because it's very unethical to deny medication that we currently administer and know works to human subjects. That would be treating people worse than we treat the general population. That's unethical.

3. We don't just do this vaccines, but ALL medication. When we make new drugs to treat cancer, we don't compare them against saline. Because that's evil. We compare them against known effective chemotherapy regimes.

4. All of this is besides the point, because using an inert placebo wouldn't help anything. How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe? It doesn't.

5. We DO use inert placebos all the time - just not in human trials. Because we want to give humans real medicine so they don't fucking die.

[mike_hearn]

Known safe according to who? The panel of people RFK Jr just fired, or the other credentialed experts he replaced them with who say the safety wasn't actually known at all?

People who are given placebos in trials aren't "denied medication". They can always take it after the trial has ended and they're unblinded, if the trial succeeds.

> How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe?

Imagine - bear with me here - imagine that an unsafe vaccine got approved. It uses some technology that's unsafe. We know this happens because vaccines are sometimes pulled from the market for being unsafe after approval.

Now imagine you have a second vaccine in trial, which shares some technology with the first, and it gets tested against the first before it's realized that was unsafe. People suffer or even die but the FDA declares it to be perfectly safe because the control group are suffering at the same rate, and for the same reasons.

Now consider what happens when it's discovered by the population that the government claimed a vaccine was safe but it was actually hurting people, and those who never took it at all were better off. It destroys their trust in the system of course.

That's why you have to use inert placebos. There's nothing unethical about this. It's a standard safety precaution. The alternative, as you are now discovering, is that the entire system is torn down and one day there may be no vaccines at all - banned by constitutional amendment - because the sort of people who are pro-vaccine kept making false claims about safety due to dangerously optimistic testing practices.

[const_cast]

> That's why you have to use inert placebos. There's nothing unethical about this. It's a standard safety precaution.

This isn't true.

We do use inert placebos, but for some medications, we are not going to be doing that in human trials for obvious safety and ethical concerns. Keep in mind: we do NOT just jump to human trials. We also do cellular trials and animal trials.

Again, if we're trying out a new cancer drug, we're not going to give the control group saline - we're going to give them a chemotherapy regime that we know works. I don't understand what's not clicking for you because it's actually very simple and intuitive.

And, as an aside: the government has not recommended any vaccines that are unsafe. You may feel the COVID vaccines were not safe. That doesn't mean they're unsafe. In addition, there are numerous reasons why a medication might be pulled, and it's quite rare that the reason is safety in absolute. Some medication may be less safe than another so we obsolesce said medication - but even that does not mean that it is unsafe. Just inferior.

With any medication, or in fact any substance, including even water, there are risks. We're generally very aware of the risk before the medication is administered and we work to minimize them in various ways. The simple reality is that dozens have vaccines have worked together to eradicate many diseases in the US, and these health initiatives have been very successful. Other countries are not so lucky, so they are dealing with diseases that we haven't touched in decades.

Please bare in mind that viruses and bacteria are not risk-free, nor are they necessarily the type of thing you can just recover from. For example, about 2% of people who contract Polio will develop paralysis. 2% is extraordinarily high. Just because you might be fine, or you know people who are fine, doesn't mean that the disease is low-risk. With COVID specifically, we're still uncovering long-term effects of infection. With viruses like HSV, we're also uncovering long-term effects like increased risk of cancer and potentially dementia.

Just because you get sick and seem to recover, doesn't mean that what happened was safe and done.

[bettercaust]

Nah, that's is just an artifact of an conflated claim made by RFK Jr. and others and the more complex reality that needs to be underlined to refute it. If the claim is "no vaccine products on the market were tested against a saline placebo", that is untrue because new first-in-class vaccines were. If the claim is "no vaccine classes on the market were tested against a saline placebo", that is untrue because as far as I can tell all classes were tested against a saline placebo at some point. If the claim is "some vaccine products on the market were not tested against a saline placebo", that would be true and it would not be a problem if those vaccine products were of vaccine classes that were previously tested against saline placebo.

How are you qualifying this strategy as "ultra-high risk"? How well do you understand the new drug and vaccine regulatory process in the US? An "unsafe" (vague) vaccine will be discovered via postmarketing surveillance (e.g. Rotashield). If two unsafe vaccines are trialed comparatively and the adverse event rate is unusually high for both groups than what was previously reported, that's not going to go unnoticed even if it appears like there's no significant difference between the two statistically. Your concern also assumes that because the first approval was erroneous that all subsequent ones will be too, which is an unfounded assumption.

If you want to claim that the medical profession have "routinely lied as a group about many things in the past", you'll have to back that up because I don't agree and will not accept your assertion at face value.