Quite possibly. When a thread is flooded with the same rhetoric over and over again, it becomes difficult to invest much effort trying to find a diamond in all the chaff. I’m not someone who believes vaccines are incapable of causing adverse effects. Of course they can. Any medical intervention can. The question has always been about scale of risk versus benefit. Take VITT (vaccine induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia) as an example. It absolutely exists. It was identified during the COVID vaccination campaigns and has been studied extensively. The incidence was estimated at roughly 1 case per 50,000–100,000 doses with adenovirus vector vaccines, and much lower with mRNA vaccines. Importantly, the mechanism is now understood and clinicians know how to recognise and treat it early. But in comparison with the risks from the disease itself. COVID infection increased the risk of thrombosis many times over, with studies showing blood clot rates several orders of magnitude higher than vaccine-associated clotting. Severe respiratory infections in general - including influenza - significantly increase clot risk due to inflammation, dehydration, and vascular stress. The same applies to myocarditis. Many people talk about it as if it appeared out of nowhere with COVID vaccines. In reality myocarditis has been recognised for decades as a complication of viral infections, including influenza, adenovirus, and many common respiratory viruses. In fact infection-associated myocarditis occurs far more frequently than vaccine-associated myocarditis, and tends to be more severe. So yes - I am well aware that vaccines can have side effects. Pretending they are impossible would be dishonest. What I do not do is exaggerate extremely rare risks while ignoring vastly larger risks from the diseases themselves. Medicine is never about zero risk. It is about which option results in the least harm overall. On that balance, vaccines remain one of the most overwhelmingly positive public health interventions ever developed. If that is considered “not too intelligent”, I’m comfortable with that.
