philospher> Why do you think one side is more knowledgeable than the other side,
> you can decide who and how people can come to conclusions
I hear your concerns about government, and I agree with them. Every politician’s judgment is suspect, and every gov administrator is a politician, working and keeping his way up. I am all for skepticism, but it does not mean that we just need to weight equally everything you can google.
I personally have expertise and training in data analysis and that is what I am trying to judge.
>> “controlled studies” of medication takes years before it is allowed on the market while these so-called uncontrolled “studies” (they are certainly NOT controlled studies- the average Joe is the studied specimen) are merely months old
again, good questions that I am also concerned about. I reviewed history of multi-year vaccine controlled studies and follow-ups after that. Most of side effects are discovered early.
Uncontrolled studies seem to be strong, I read several. They work the following way – you match every vaccinated person to a similar unvaccinated one and do pairwise comparison on million of pairs. It is good technology. It is not as good as controlled study to get one single answer – 94% or 80%, but it is very good at fishing out multiple potential correlations and problems. This approach is more likely to generate false predictions that have to be later validated by controlled studies than to miss one. Note also that there are studies from different countries now – Israel, UK, EU. They all have governments, but still there is some diversity of views here, and many published as preprints before they get reviewed.
Most important, there are cases of caution and there are of trade-offs. For example, mask wearing, SD, online learning, outdoor minyanim are no-brainer from public health prospective – even when the government says – don’t worry, spend money, I want to be re-elected, we now can handle number of patients, you can be a little more cautious not to be one of those patients.
But, with vaccine, you have a trade-off: you risk either a vaccine or a virus. One is made in Western countries trying to save people, another – wild or made in China trying to hurt people. I am more worrying about the second. So, you need to weigh your exposure risk: if you have high chance of being exposed, I would choose vaccine any time. If you are not exposed and a teenager, the numbers are not so clear to me.