I am yet to see any counter except the anti vax rhetoric.
Hey labels hardly help but my key counters on reason are covered and I would counter with the idea that if you label me as anti-vaxer, you're not likely to see anything that I say as worth thinking over. Yet if I really was an anti-vaxer, I would not have taken two shots myself.
A more nuanced discussion might help though, and maybe we can move to the Covid thread in case you are interested. I am stating my key concerns again in bullets:
1. Calculation of vaccine efficacy is based on relative risk reduction and overstates the benefits from the vaccine.
2. Poor adverse event reporting during the trial understates risks of the jab, and rushed trials had procedural lapses, which makes risk reward unreliable.
3. Covid vaccine trials didn't assess long term risk, and the study was discontinued after a short period. This is inexplicable and the only reason I see is that nobody wants to assess long term risks.
4. Blatant conflicts of interests at drug regulatory bodies, and political pressure to approve vaccines from their own countries and not from countries with competing political interests.
5. Regulatory bodies are inherently bureaucratic with entrenched conflicts of interests and are full of doctors, and lack multidisciplinary competencies.
6. Boosters were approved based on correlates of protection - without any human trials. That is far worse. Correlates of protection are being pushed by the industry as acceptable but the debate is hardly settled on this one.
The protocols for treatment and isolation for COVID were ever changing based on what they were observing and discovering.
I presume you got me wrong there. I have no issues with changing treatment protocols, and in fact am sympathetic. However, my concern is limited to what is known now that corners were cut and processes were not followed specifically for vaccine trials and emergency use authorization of drugs. That simply makes it pseudoscience. It can potentially have devastating consequences and I can not see any reason for a scientist to accept poor practices because population and the political leadership is desperate for a solution. And success is no post-facto justification for such decisions.
You want to see retrospective studies for the first COVID vaccines before they were administered to you ? Well, then you should have waited to take the vaccine because those "studies" were all on the live population on whom the vaccine was administered and would not have been available until much later.
I guess I wasn't clear. I am looking for retrospective studies now, to establish how much worse or better are the unvaccinated cohorts doing now. Please do not see it as an adversarial discussion - I am keen to hear your side and change my stance, but we both have to form our own views based on our perspectives.
did you try finding out instead of blindly "trusting the authorities" ?
I did read what I could at the time, including the papers that covered the outcomes of clinical trials, but admittedly I never thought that the published statistics were not all that there was to be learned. Subsequent revelations , some forced by US courts have been quite disappointing.