Are vaccines safe? Who knows. The methodology used to test them is so unbelievably fucked, it's dishonest to call it "valid science."
It's impossible to convince the anti-vax crowd of the safety of the COVID vaccine.
Dr. Larry Greer
Referring to the "anti-vax crowd" is a fallacious merger of two distinct arguments against vaccines.
The first argument is the rejection of the COVID vaccine being administered to adults. The second argument is the rejection of the vaccine schedule for newborns. I want to untangle these arguments and address them separately.
On the COVID-19 Vaccine
Regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, one prominent data point oft-spewed by proponents is the death toll of COVID. I posit that it's impossible to know the true death toll.
During the emergency declaration, insurance was covering, with no deductible, any COVID-related treatment, so lots of nice doctors were writing COVID on everything. Thanks for that -- it saved a lot of people money -- but it fucked up our data. Besides those hospital records, there are no data sources that can be reviewed in hindsight to answer the question of "how many people really died with COVID, and how many were labelled as COVID because doctors wanted to save people money?"
In other words, proponents of the COVID-19 vaccine are this close to agreeing with opponents of it. They're only lacking the abandonment of faith that "we know how bad COVID-19 was, because we believe the government" to "we can't know how bad COVID was, given how the government performed during it."
If the COVID-19 vaccine was actually a miracle cure, with no safety risks resulting from its rapid development, it might be unwarranted to abandon that faith. Instead, the government allowed vaccine recipients to self-report vaccine injuries. Such self-reporting is often vulnerable to the effects of placebo. So, while this database showed a statistically significant increase in vaccine injuries, researchers wrote it off as placebo. Which -- fine, that's a valid interpretation -- but come the fuck on - you morons chose to monitor injuries via self-reporting, despite knowing the inherent unreliability self-reporting.
There are only two conclusions we can draw from this decision: either scientists and the government were so incompetent that they didn't realize they were generating unreliable data, or they needed unreliable data to hide an elevated rate of injury.
Lest we forget, that makes two instances of unreliable data being used to support the decision to vaccinate: the number of deaths in unvaccinated populations is potentially overstated, and the number of vaccine injuries is potentially understated. Despite knowing exactly how to perform the trials required to know both numbers with certainty, the government and vaccine manufacturers, through either incompotence or fraud, chose to generate unreliable data.
I leave to the reader's own judgment whether the risks are unquantifiable as a result of incompetence or fraud. I'm not sure which is more palatable.
On Newborn Vaccination
No matter which conclusion you draw, the hesitancy to vaccinate newborns flows logically from it. We still haven't described a method of action by which a vaccine injury could occur. But there is an obvious one: contamination.
From there, it's a very short hop from "I love vaccines" to "babies can't eat cheese because the bacteria in it could kill them, but we're giving them how many injections before they leave the hospital?" I'm not sure if "the age it's okay to feed babies cheese" has any relevance to "the age it's okay to give vaccines," but let's consider it, for the sake of illustration.
Cheese is acceptable after 6 months. In that same period, the CDC recommends a vaccination schedule including a dose of RSV, two doses of Hep B, two doses of RV1, two doses of DTaP, two doses of Hib, two doses of PVC15, and two doses of polio. That's 13 injections while their body is still so unprepared for this world that cheese can kill them.
That schedule seems a little aggressive -- Hep B is transmitted sexually and via contaminated needles. If your newborn is having unprotected sex or shooting heroin, you have bigger problems than Hep B. If risk mitigation was even an ancillary goal of vaccination schedule, the logical outcome would be recommending the Hep B vaccine after ~6 months, rather than at birth and 30 days.
Every pursuit on this planet, no matter the quantity or validity of the science behind it, contains unknown unknowns. Unk-unks are "things you don't know that you don't know." Contrast the danger of unk-unks to regular unknowns: when you know what you don't know, you can take steps to mitigate the risks inherent in the unknown. With unk-unks, the risks tend to blindside you.
Similar to with the COVID-19 vaccination, a hesitancy to vaccinate would be unwarranted if the rate of vaccine injury could be reliably detected. In the case of newborns, this rate is supposed to be identified via the clinical trials. However, new vaccines are tested against a control group of existing vaccines, because it would be unethical to deny treatment (vaccination) to the control group.
When your control group is "no vaccine," you should get fairly good science. The error rate (chance you generated bad science) is 1%. When your control group is "the first vaccine," the error rate compounds. Now it's 1%^1%. When you're 3 levels deep, it's 1%^1%^1%. In other words, imagine that, for example, an autism rate of 2 in 100 would trigger red flags on the first vaccine trial. The second study might need a rate of 4 in 100, because it uses the autism rate of the first study as its baseline. The third study might need 8 in 100 to raise a red flag.
This is not a good way to do clinical trials. It creates a hell of a lot of unknown-unknowns, and it's perfectly logical to take additional risk mitigation steps, like delaying vaccination, even when this extra risk mitigation conflicts with "established science." Acceptable risk is always unquantifiable and depends on the individuals' risk preference; and, in the case of newborn vaccination, real risk is poorly quantified as a result of the methodology used to quantify it.
I leave to the reader's own judgment whether the risks are unquantifiable as a result of incompetence or fraud. I'm not sure which is more palatable.
Trust the science, not the scientists.
I know we all say "I wouldn't care if my child was autistic or handicapped, I'd love them anyway." But unless you really, really mean that, deciding that the risks are too high is a perfectly logical outcome: it's not a question of whether we've studied vaccine safety risks; it's a question of whether those studies are statistically valid. If they're not, then we must doubt the science generated in them.
The government decides what level of manufacturing-process contaminents are 'safe' in an injection by asking Pfizer. How could that go wrong? I'll leave the answer to the reader's imagination and simply close with an analogy instead:
Our water utility is required to test and publish our PFAS levels because the government asked Dow for 40 years how much PFAS was safe to use making Teflon. Turns out the answer was zero, because PFAS mimics fatty acids and hormones and never breaks down or excretes. It just took us decades to realize Dow was full of shit.
I wonder what we'll know about vaccination in a few more decades. Science always marches forward, and from time to time, we learn things we didn't know that we didn't know. Wisdom says "trust the science, not the scientists." A valid correllary is, "trust vaccines, not vaccine manufacturers." There is but one truth, and science has been known to dance around it (or completely miss it) for hundreds of years.
Until more unknown-unknowns are examined by studies with valid methodologies, and by entities with no vested financial interest, I must leave to the reader's judgment whether the current body of research reflects the truth.