Heart inflammation cases in young men higher than expected after mRNA vaccines

I made the absolutely correct assessment that the balance of probabilities was strongly in favour of the idea that mixing vaccines would be at least as effective as getting the same shot twice. A really good example of taking a most obvious path.

There are lots of jurisdictions that have done a very good job doing just very obvious things that work. Pretending that recent challenges or flare-ups negates the enormous areas under the death and hospitalisation curves to this point for these places is another example of obvious dishonesty in your arguments. This is like when Trump said "South Korea I hear isn't doing that well anymore" when the epidemic was raging in the US and SK was trying to get a daily case count in the hundreds under control.

As well citing the powerful flouting the rules as some excuse to not have rules is doubly dishonest and silly.

Australia's "draconian" rules look pretty good to me, under the draconian rules I am living under I can't go to a comedy club - I could in Melbourne. And if my neighbour lived in Melbourne I presume that the gall bladder surgery that he's had delayed 3 times because the hospitals are full would be done already. I live in place that effectively cancelled Mother's Day on the Friday in a bout of such stupid incompetence that seemed almost perfectly designed to bankrupt restaurants after weeks of warnings from the doctors and the media that the hospitals are literally filling up. The correct path in that instance was obvious, the government refused to take it and now I am in fact still living under draconian rules that could have been relaxed weeks ago if timely action had been taken.

If you want an example of a jurisdiction that has hardly any advantages and many, many disadvantages I would point you towards Atlantic Canada - a highly import dependent economy that is very integrated with the US and the rest of Canada, strained healthcare system at the best of times, and a very old population. Look at their results, moderate travel restrictions, reasonable enforcement, high levels of public engagement. It wasn't even very hard for them to do it, they just had to make the choice and did so.

Absolutely nothing in modern epidemiology is validated against real world data as far as I can tell, and virology isn't concerned with the course of epidemics, so I doubt this very much.

The problem this assumption faces (and it is as you point out, only an assumption) is it quickly runs into definitional and logic issues. That's a very common problem in epidemiology and public health as far as I can tell. Viruses evolve, and so when talking about whether they can eventually infect the whole population you have to very carefully consider:

1. How fast they evolve.

2. How fast they spread.

3. How much evolution is required to make something a "new" virus vs an "old" virus.

4. What those evolutions do to disease which is what everyone actually cares about.

If you don't have a very firm grip on these things (and epidemiology doesn't) then you can get into a situation in which by the time a virus has infected "everyone" it's no longer the same virus at all, and thus cannot be said to have actually infected everyone. All the talk of different COVID variants is pointing in this direction. Taken to an extreme it boils down to "everyone will get infected with a virus at some point" which isn't an interesting statement.

Somewhat related: it's a common cognitive bias to trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others.

Indeed it is, and scientists are very often guilty of this: they reject any and all negative feedback that comes from people "out of field", even if it's extremely relevant to what they're doing. For example rejecting feedback by computer scientists of the form "your program does not work" because computer science isn't the same thing as epidemiology.

But in this case I actually don't trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others, because I don't claim to have any superior knowledge of epidemiology. I just know the people who claim to be experts, actually aren't.