The COVID vaccines were fairly effective in reducing infection rates and severity.
The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.
we were told the covid vaccines would prevent infection, then when they didn't, the narrative changed to reduced severity, is a more accurate statement of what you said.
In somewhat of a case in point on losing public trust, mentioning politicians and corporate media outlets lying about something seemed about as redundant to me as mentioning water being wet.
It's not politicians and media being embroiled in scandal that is surprising. It's that they still have their jobs. Politicians used to resign after scandal and reporters got fired. Now they get promoted
Politicians used to resign because of the expectation that they'd be voted out, in turn because of the expectation that the media would inform the voters of their mendacity.
The media has become so partisan that each side will attack the other with equal ferocity regardless of who was right on a particular issue, so now the politicians roll the dice and most of the time they still get reelected right after their own misbehavior.
The question is why the media continues to do this, given that they are clearly not benefiting from it -- their viewership/readership numbers are in the toilet, a lot of them have already gone out of business and the others are on the same trajectory.
I suspect it's something like, they've cultivated a partisan audience and if they now try to be neutral, they short-term lose partisans faster than they gain moderates and then some MBA who can't think past next quarter insists that they stop.
But returning to the original intercept course with the ground is hardly a genius plan.
they are high risk, not for covid infection, but because they have other comorbidities, i.e. what are they really dying of? doctor were forced to check "covid" even if the doctors didn't believe that.
The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.