My grandmother died because of an FDA approved therapy that was later pulled from the market. One of many [1].
Given that experience, I think the process we have in place to greenlight medical therapies is not perfect, and I don't think it's unreasonable to be more cautious than the FDA is.
Yes, there are other cases too like thalidomide. Edge cases or misses don’t mean that you throw the baby out with the bathwater. What’s the alternative? Let skeptical people keep effective treatments from the vast majority of the population?
> It seemed to me like most of the opposition was to the mandate rather than to letting people take the vaccine if they chose to.
That's how it seems to me too, but somehow the people with that perspective are not the ones being represented in HHS. Instead, we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has chosen to "approve" a COVID-19 vaccine while restricting most currently-healthy adults from using it (even though vaccines are supposed to prevent currently-healthy people from getting an infection or as severe of an infection).
The way vaccines work is you can never really eradicate things if everyone doesn’t take it. We would still have smallpox floating around if the vaccination drive wasn’t mandatory.
Additionally the GP here is advocating for restricting mRNA research in general which seems to be a general theme with the post truth folks.
It's also the herd immunity that comes from mass vaccination, some individuals with health conditions can not build immunity from vaccines (e.g. organ transplant recipients on immunosuppressants) and are much more likely to die from infections, herd immunity is the only way they can be protected and have a normal life.
