>>13335788The main concern I have is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There isn't any strong evidence of any particularly bad side effects.
I think the line of reasoning is/ought to be:
Can X cause bad thing in Y quantity? Y/N
If yes, then
Is there decent statistical evidence that it doesn't for >=Y quantity? Or, is it, according to reason and special domain knowledge, unlikely to happen? Is the risk of bad thing much higher with X than in the normal population?
Regarding domain knowledge, for example, if I wanted to know if some concoction with cyanide was deadly, a domain expert could easily say >Y milligrams is very deadly to a human, while I, without knowledge and seeing the concoction as a black box, would say, feed it to some humans first in order to tell.
Unfortunately, I don't have any domain knowledge, so I have to rely on others or statistical data. And statistical data can be quite lacking, either in numbers, or in explanatory power, i.e., as people seem to fail to condition on important characteristics of the population (like BMI, age, comorbidities).
In other words, I feel I am at a loss, especially since for anything long-term, there will be no data, and I'm essentially a blind idiot stumbling around in the dark wrt domain knowledge. I have two options, it seems: trust or distrust the academics' consensus. I also think it is more apt to be comparing the vaccine to COVID, however I feel ignorant on both fronts.
