Of course there's a downside. It's a tale as old as time. Some new miracle cure comes on the scene and people promote it without relaying the risks. You see this with mushrooms, pot, etc going back to snake oil and silphium. I've never looked into it, but I would bet that there are no medications that exist that don't have some sort of side effect or increase in risk of some negative outcome. So if someone is pushing a cure/medicine its best to assume there is risk, even if we don't yet know the risk.
As opposed to what belief? That it is possible for there to be medical interventions or substances that are entirely risk-free regardless of your individual circumstances, potentially hidden allergies, or other known or unknown contraindications? Was anyone ever under such an impression?
If you've ever listened to some of people pushing or debating psychedelics, or natural remedies, or even "totally safe" vaccines, then it should be readily apparent.
Vaccines are a bit of a different can of worms in that first generally, they’re well-studied and the risks are reasonably well known, and second the impact isn’t solely personal — you’re trading off in most cases a small risk for the betterment of society — maintaining herd immunity, reducing capacity for spreading, etc depending on vaccine. The lives of many others can be negatively impacted, in some cases fatally, by one’s personal choice to not partake. There’s a certain amount of social responsibility involved.
Psychoactives and homeopathy have plenty of capacity to be harmful and aren’t necessarily anywhere near as well studied, but at least their effects are more bounded to the individual. (This does not however justify pushing them blindly.)
The effects of drugs aren't bound to the individual, that's the reason nearly all societies have banned them throughout history: they cause addicts to create large external costs.
Saying vaccines are well studied is like saying drugs are well studied, it's a category error. You can't study vaccines as a whole, and the quality of studies of specific cases vary wildly. As a consequence, common psychedelics are probably much better studied than some common vaccines. LSD in 2025 is the same substance as it was when it first became available, as far as I know, and there's lots of research into its effects. Compare that to the COVID vaccines which weren't even the same substance from trial to deployment, as the manufacturing process was changed completely. The trials were done on vaccine made using a very slow, non-scalable and expensive process that yielded a very pure result. The stuff people actually took was made using a totally different process designed for cheap mass manufacture. That second process had problems, leading to DNA contamination in some batches, which seems to explain why injury effect reports clustered by batch serial number.
All this was heavily suppressed for a long time (e.g. by rules forbidding study of vaccine vials), but has been coming out over the past year or so as the initial findings were confirmed. Research into psychedelics at least doesn't have that kind of problem, I think?
The context of this thread is that anything that is a medication has some sort of side effect and that some people overlook that. This is just as true for vaccines as for mushrooms. Cost benefit analysis is completely different.
As much as side effects get overlooked in some circumstances, they’re wildly overplayed in others and sometimes become the singular factor going into cost-benefit analysis, which is a problem.
The same way that not acknowledging that some accepted-as-benign substances can bring about mental health crises, overweighting of personal risks can cause weight-bearing pillars of modern society to crumble.
