But then how to you explain the fact that they kept saying “safe and effective” when what little data they had and did not share
showed there were in fact possible serious side effects?
Also, have you looked in to those companies track records? Intentional censorship and corruption is not foreign to them.
I think they were just trying to avoid even bigger problems. If the vaccines were considered dangerous, no one would get vaccinated, and that would have led to an even bigger epidemic. And the choice was between insufficiently tested, hastily made vaccines, and their complete absence during the epidemic. I think at the stage they were at, they simply did not have enough information. Much like people of the past. For example, if you study, I don’t know (I’ll give examples from what I know for sure) ancient architecture in the country where I was born, here ancient palaces were built with the active use of lead. Special paints, enamels were produced, and they were used to paint the palaces where the nobility lived.
And only later, several centuries later, it turned out that lead is actually poisonous and leads to a decrease in life expectancy.
I also know the story about the material asbestos, from which cheap stove pipes for small summer houses were made in the USSR. They were produced in large quantities, and everyone bought them, but there were no general statistics. And only later, years later, it turned out that asbestos is carcinogenic and harmful to health. No one died from it obviously, and without long-term and extensive use, it was impossible to guess what was wrong there.
Nowadays these pipes are still actively produced. True, they have almost stopped using them for furnaces, and are used for purposes not related to heating, and in this position they do not emit (or almost do not emit) harmful substances). Well, and in the automobile industry, as I heard, they began to refuse asbestos gaskets and make them from other materials.
The same story with radioactive materials - when they just got into people's hands, everyone thought that they were completely safe and even tried to use them in agriculture to increase plant growth (!). Similar experiments, I heard, were conducted in the USSR and the USA, although they did not receive widespread distribution. And only after them it became clear that making garden tools from weapons-grade plutonium (I'm exaggerating a little, of course) is not the best idea. But without practice and statistics it was impossible to find out.
I think any innovation requires a long test and time, and if there is no time, it is impossible to know how good or bad it is. Be that as it may, I believe that having received statistical data, pharmaceutical companies adjusted their technologies and production. At least judging by Russian vaccines - after the first, several others, more advanced ones appeared. Well, yes, if we take the Russian history of vaccines - at first, covid came to our country very little, there was almost none. But our doctors and scientists flew en masse ... to Italy, where there were difficulties in hospitals, they ran a lot there, helped, studied. Some people were surprised - why is our country suddenly forcing its doctors to go to a country that is part of the unfriendly NATO bloc, spending money on this mass travel, sending some portable hospitals there, hanging around there to treat and vaccinate someone.
Why is there such strange kindness and generosity towards countries that impose economic sanctions against us? It was all simple - our doctors and scientists needed experience in fighting the epidemic. Because there was very little COVID in Russia. And when COVID began to spread more actively, doctors returned from there with some experience, and the Russian vaccine turned out to be relatively successful. As a result, we came out of this situation with somewhat fewer losses.
At the same time, the Italian side, it seems, did not understand anything - why did Russian doctors suddenly come to Italy and work hard there, set up hospitals and run between hospital beds with oxygen, then with something else, simultaneously spending a lot of money on aviation, street hospitals, etc.
And we simply gained experience before the epidemic hit our country. Therefore, the latest vaccines were already somewhat tested, although I will not undertake to judge their ideality. Maybe many years later, some bad side effects will also be discovered on them, which we do not know about now.
The US found itself in a more difficult and dangerous situation - the fact is that in Russia people travel very little. Most often, everyone sits at home, and goes on vacation - well, somewhere to a nearby dacha, where they grow cucumbers and tomatoes near a small summer house. And the US is quite a trading country, people travel a lot, and the volume of foreign goods and specialists coming and going is quite large. Therefore, the epidemic hit harder and more suddenly. And in Russia... In Russia, there are cities from which no one goes anywhere beyond the suburbs (to go for a walk in the forest to pick mushrooms), covid never came to such cities at all. It simply was not there. By the time it got there, people had long since been vaccinated.
This is because of the different lifestyle - people here travel very little, almost never go to restaurants, cinemas are empty here because people prefer to watch TV at home and not go anywhere, and this was the case long before Covid. As a result of this lifestyle, the epidemic spread slowly. Although in large commercial cities, yes, there were difficulties, and a large number of patients in hospitals. But, according to one doctor I know, two neighboring hospitals in the area where I live have not encountered Covid at all. They were planned to receive patients, they thought they would have to close entire buildings so that dangerously infected patients could stay there, but ... It ended in nothing. The patients did not come, they were not there. And the hospitals continued to work according to the old scheme, doing their usual things. Based on this, I can assume that isolating people during a pandemic is still useful. Another thing is that if people are already sick, this will not help them become healthier. The only thing is that their isolation will help others not to get infected from them, that's all.
Well, in fact, I can give you another fact - I personally live near a forest, I rarely communicate with people, and I rarely go to stores, and when there was covid, I wore a mask and avoided traveling. As a result... I never got sick with covid, at all. At the same time, I didn’t even get vaccinated, because I was afraid to go during the declared epidemic, and then... And then I was already too lazy, why should I go somewhere to a hospital, where I’ll have to walk 10 kilometers through the forest or order a taxi from far away, going along a country road and paying money for it. And so it ended in nothing. And now mass vaccination has been canceled here, and I don’t even know whether to get vaccinated or not. Apparently, I will only get vaccinated when I go to the city on business, and that will not be before next year...
Of course, I am not a doctor, and it is difficult for me to speak about all this reasonably; I am just a simple man in the street and I do not share information so much as I gossip.
