On Science and Faith-Based Product Safety
Let's pretend we are talking about a car.
I came upon a tweet, and the cognitive dissonance of said tweet made me ponder logic, citizen rights, and the value of good timing.
The quoted tweet is a little blunt but the article itself is written like a Soviet school essay where the conclusion is predefined, and the body of the essay is built around the conclusion. In other words, despite the puzzling tweet, the article oozes faith.
And faith is cool—please bear with my idealism for a minute—but if faith is such strong grounds for assuming the long-term safety of a product, why have the manufacturers been so pointedly intent on not being liable?
The Jerusalem Post @Jerusalem_Post
Over two billion people worldwide have been inoculated against #COVID-19, now #Israeli researchers are trying to learn if #mRNA vaccines are dangerous long term https://t.co/MoStHV9QSz
Pfizer has quite literally bullied various governments to shake liability waivers out of them. AstraZeneca’s rep said on record that the company could not take the risk of being liable if anything were to happen in the future.
Is it by any chance the consumer who is getting the adventurous end of the stick?
After all, the Comirnaty insert does say that it “has not been evaluated for the potential to cause carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, or impairment of male fertility.”
After all, there have been multiple precedents where companies knowingly lied to the public.
Am I naive? Does my Soviet self have heightened consumer safety standards?
Would anyone buy a car where the company has not taken the time to make sure that the brakes will still work in five years—while knowing that one cannot sue the manufacturer if the car malfunctions?
Am I insane? Am I in an upside down world?
Something tells me that making manufacturers liable would scream “safe and effective” much louder than lotteries, doughnuts, and passports… And if our health is of such great importance to the government, why are the manufacturers protected, and we are not?
Oh and one more thing. The Jerusalem Post article says the following:
While the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first mRNA ones to ever be brought to market for human patients, Linial said she believes the reason that no mRNA vaccine has been developed until now is because there was just no need to move this fast on a vaccine until COVID-19 came along.
I’d like to point out that Moderna switched to the format of v-es as opposed to therapeutics specifically because they couldn’t figure out safe dosing for therapeutics. They switched to v-nes because v-nes were supposed to be one dose. For whatever it’s worth, and whatever it means scientifically, it’s happened.
And finally, I am going to go on an impolite Peter Daszak tangent and quote my own article, as a reminder of the fact that the profit motive came first:
Well, well, well, didn’t Peter Daszak, a well-connected gentleman of the “yeah I am really excited we’re working with the Wuhan lab on gain-of-function but anyone who says that this virus came from the lab is a conspiracy theorist” fame—and also the gentleman who, in his FOIA-released private email, specifically thanked Dr. Fauci for “debunking” the lab hypothesis—didn’t he say in 2015 that that the most important factor in creating a strong market demand for a pan-coronavirus v-word was going to be media hype, and once the media hype was there, “the investors will respond”? Okay, it could be a coincidence but it seems like this particular man has his fingers deeply in every aspect of both the “coronavirus pandemic” and the “health response”—and it just so happens that the response is exactly what the he was looking for. Oh, and he was also appointed to investigate the lab hypothesis under the auspices of the WHO. Furthermore—and this is something that makes me wonder—allegedly, every aspect of what we got to know as the “novel coronavirus” has been patented (!!!) prior to 2019, according to a testimony by David Martin, who, let me repeat, is rather impressively credentialed and highly qualified.]
The end.
So much brilliant work, Tessa. Thanks so much for it all!
To your point I have a page on my site with products that used to be "safe and recommended" until they started to kill people. https://zero-sum.org/safe-and-recommended/