Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
It's a serious political failure amongst some of the most influential national leaders in the EU, worst of all Macron himself in France. They were so busy traducing the AstraZeneca vaccine in retaliation for being told they couldn't have as much of it as they wanted, they have caused public scepticism and arguably now enabled regulatory over-caution in the face of 'evidence' that might - just might - justify briefly pausing use of a medicine in normal times, in the absence of a massive, readily available data set to compare their domestic experience with.
Of course in the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine there is data from something like 12 million people and counting that says there's no evidence of a causal link with blood clots, plus a deliberate study of its safety in Finland that likewise determines it is as safe as the UK's MHRA, the EMA and WHO have said all along. The medicines regulators all over Europe are fiddling while Rome burns, and later this year they'll all be locked down again while we're increasingly getting back to normal. Their desire for self-flagellation is bizarre.
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The worst thing about it is that anti-vax sentiment is really hard to stop once you've set it running. If you've undermined faith not only in the vaccines but by extension the health experts who've developed, tested and recommended them then you can't easily fix it. A reassuring statement from your health regulator won't do anything because these are the same people whose advice and findings you've already told people to dismiss. As with all conspiratory thinking the very people best placed to debunk people's concerns and theories are part of the problem. Macron has undermined the very institutions he is going to later depend on to encourage an already vaccine sceptical public to take up the jab.
It's the same problem as MMR. One dodgy study undermined faith in vaccines for over a decade purely because its findings were promoted by papers like the Daily Mail and Private Eye who portrayed the efforts of regulators and the NHS to ally fears as part of an establishment stitch-up.