Why do ypu need a conspiracy where incompetence would suffice (not saying that’s the case but nobody fully understanding what’s happening seems like a more reasonable explanation compared to “foul play”)? Also it’s not unreasonable to believe that many of the researchers understood that not all the side effects were known but still judged that deploying the vaccines is worth it because the benefits outweigh the risk by a magnitude or two (again it’s hard to say if they were right).
Yes, the struggle between knowing enough to act correctly and not acting because we don't know enough to act is the trade-off we wrestle with at the heart of medicine. This is what it means to do no harm. Improper actions don't need to be the result of a conspiracy to result in disaster, no. However, what we do have to do, is work with the best information we have to make the best decision we can and act when we're confident we know enough. Where we don't make the right decision, in hindsight, we learn from it for the future. If our processes and systems, uncorrupted - as best we can tell, say that it's much, much more beneficial to perform a procedure or take a medication then we generally do that. That's how modern medicine, as we know it, has worked since it has been modern medicine. It's always a game of statistics and learning.
Doctors still feed people green jello and white bread. And statistics is not applied in every hospital in America to prove this is shit food and not good for your health.
Wide spread poor choices in industry backed by science is not only possible, it's frequent and common.
To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.
Your supposition that I endorsed any of these positions you assert I did simply does not follow from my statements. I cannot respond to your rebuttal of an argument I did not make. Please, try to avoid non sequitur, if you wish to discuss our views and opinions confluently.
However, to touch upon your point about the recent evidence-based medicine and hospital management movements - yes, they were once sorely lacking, with existing pre-modern medical practices handling quite a bit of load. However, the consensus is that evidence-based practices are already well established for high risk areas of practice and only increasing as time goes on elsewhere.
It's important to note that modern versus pre-modern medicine isn't a hard line, but a continuum we're continually shifting to the left. It's very much more like the border between generations instead of the hard line between decades.
In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches. This is a very good thing as they are, generally speaking, much more powerful tools. We've figured out how to understand evidence and understand when we have enough to make good decisions and now we use it. We didn't always, but we're working towards replacing what came before but until then we're often forced to use it because we've nothing better or it hurts worse to do nothing. That's how most things are - that's how medicine is.
> To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.
The consensus of experts on the validity of the collection and interpretation of data, relying on the tools of statistical analysis of that data to make sound decisions about the applicability of that data as evidence, in relationship to deciding the answer to question at hand - relying of multiple points of view and power to cross check, reproduce experiments, and systematically eliminate biases - is exactly what science is. Is the process perfect? Absolutely not! Is it better than taking everything in and saying "well, both sides make good points so I guess we'll never know", "look at all this untrustworthy, untested data I don't know how to interpret but with which I agree so the mainstream opinion must be wrong" and "who trusts academics anyway"? You know, actual anti-science? Absolutely, yes.
> In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches.
At least for "new devices" I really wish this was consistently the case.
However there are many horror stories (including here on HN), about new medical devices being grandfathered in using some prior device or category certifications (from rough memory of the description).
And it really sounds like they shouldn't be. :/
That being said, there are other HN posts about rigorous things some new device manufacturers have had to go through too.
Doctors don't feed people in hospitals. They have registered dieticians on staff for that. Most hospitals now feed patients more healthy food. Sometimes they just need to get some calories into certain patients, and green jello and white bread are easy to digest.
To be fair, it's not the doctors doing the feeding; it's the hospital administrators who are almost always business folks representing the interests of the shareholders (increasingly, PE firms).
Hospitals are glorified hotels with super over-priced roomservice and activities. But the business model is very similar.
