Yet they don’t have such an exemption for penicillin, or aspirin, or any other similar drug.
The liability shield is precisely why I am Covid-vaccine hesitant. And Pfizer’s track record of honesty when it comes to their drugs is significantly bad. Combine that with the aggressive attempts to silence even a discussion of the vaccine’s side effects makes me extremely skeptical. When “everybody” says something is “safe and effective” and the people profiting “bigly” from that something while also being shielded from literally any liability… Well, that’s enough to make me zig when others zag.
A simple arthritis drug advertised on TV has to disclose the litany of side effects — so extensive as to be comical and yet even mentioning Covid vaccine side effects can get you silenced on social media — something is just very wrong about that. You want me to vaccinate my four kids just because the government says “trust us?” Nope. I’m a grown up. I also have a scientific research background. But when even scientific papers get removed (specifically pre-Covid papers on masks and influenza,) then I’m even more likely to mistrust the “experts.”
To be clear (not that I should have to,) I don’t have the Covid vaccine, but I have all sorts of others. So do my kids. I have vaccines covering everything from Yellow Fever to Japanese Encephalitis and everything in between. But this current vaccine effort reminds me too readily of the anthrax vaccine they were giving us in the Army in the early 2000s. All sorts of neurological issues were reported in many soldiers — often so bad they had to leave the military. And then, as now, it was “safe and effective.” And a rotavirus vaccine in 1999 was pulled from the market because of a rare but serious side effect. Yet the Covid vaccines have a much higher instance of rare but serious side effects compared to that, but everyone is running around saying that the benefits outweigh the risks. Mathematically, for my age and health, that just isn’t true. Ans it’s certainly not true for most healthy children. My point isn’t to debate the vaccine though, my point is to call attention to how the debate is censored. I could very much be wrong in my concerns. Or I could be right. But the fact that we can’t even have a discussion about it is the real problem. We could also apply this to masks. Calling attention to the lack of RCTs and the over-reliance of observational studies gets you branded as an anti-science caveman extremist. Musing as to why control groups were vaccinated (thus destroying long term safety and efficacy data points) also make you an outcast.
What we are seeing isn’t science. It’s politics wrapped in an appeal to authority. The effort to over-censor literally everything contrary to Faucian doctrine has backfired and created a significant group of resisters who, frankly, have little trust in governments.