I listened to a few interviews from RFK jr. One story that he tells is that during the Trump administration he sat in a meeting with Fauci and claimed “The vaccines we use didn’t go through placebo-blind trials”. In RFK recounting Fauci claimed that the vaccine were placebo tested and promised to send Fauci studies showing so.
It turns out, that they frequently are not placebo tested and RFK was right with that claim. When looking at the claim at skeptics.stackexchange, the establishment answer is basically “Running placebo-blind trials would be unethical and we know that the vaccine are safe”. The question whether or not you really need placebo blind trials is complex and not easy to answer.
Factual issues like that seems complex enough that Peter Hotez and other people in the field are afraid of actually debating RFK on the issues.
One point RFK makes for both nuclear energy and for vaccines is that if those technologies are completely safe, then the companies that deploy them should have no problem with being liable for negative consequences and buy insurance policies to shield themselves from the risk. There would be no need for the government to have laws that limit the liability.
Asking vaccine companies to accept liability for their vaccines is basically asking them to make a bet that their vaccines are safe or to let an insurance company make a bet that they are safe.
If someone would want to increase trust in vaccines, a good step would be to write a law that says: “Because of the advance in vaccine technology, the 1986 vaccine act that declared vaccines unavoidably unsafe is outdated, and from now on vaccine producers are responsible for significant side-effect resulting from vaccines.”
[Question] Are vaccine safe enough, that we can give their producers liability?
I listened to a few interviews from RFK jr. One story that he tells is that during the Trump administration he sat in a meeting with Fauci and claimed “The vaccines we use didn’t go through placebo-blind trials”. In RFK recounting Fauci claimed that the vaccine were placebo tested and promised to send Fauci studies showing so.
It turns out, that they frequently are not placebo tested and RFK was right with that claim. When looking at the claim at skeptics.stackexchange, the establishment answer is basically “Running placebo-blind trials would be unethical and we know that the vaccine are safe”. The question whether or not you really need placebo blind trials is complex and not easy to answer.
Factual issues like that seems complex enough that Peter Hotez and other people in the field are afraid of actually debating RFK on the issues.
One point RFK makes for both nuclear energy and for vaccines is that if those technologies are completely safe, then the companies that deploy them should have no problem with being liable for negative consequences and buy insurance policies to shield themselves from the risk. There would be no need for the government to have laws that limit the liability.
Asking vaccine companies to accept liability for their vaccines is basically asking them to make a bet that their vaccines are safe or to let an insurance company make a bet that they are safe.
If someone would want to increase trust in vaccines, a good step would be to write a law that says: “Because of the advance in vaccine technology, the 1986 vaccine act that declared vaccines unavoidably unsafe is outdated, and from now on vaccine producers are responsible for significant side-effect resulting from vaccines.”