>Why don't you think the swine flu vaccine, which was much more rushed than the current COVID vaccine, was reasonably close to a worst case outcome? Or at least

>Why don't you think the swine flu vaccine, which was much more rushed than the current COVID vaccine, was reasonably close to a worst case outcome? Or at least close enough to serve as an upper bound estimate for side effects from the COVID vaccine? Because 1. the negative side-effects of a vaccine are not a function of its rushed-ness - just like the injuries you get when a car runs you over are not proportional to how quickly you ran into the road without looking both ways. 2. I don't believe there is a sensible "upper bound" for medical side-effects, apart from the obvious one (everyone dies). Even if there was, you could not think to have safely established it through a single example. >we punish regulators only when something bad happens that we think they could have prevented, not when something good fails to happen that they could have enabled. This is also a very retrospective view. How would you establish when a regulator "failed to enable" new medicine? How could you decide that an entity had enough information in advance to make a decision that is obvious in retrospect? How would that entity then prove its historical ignorance in its own defense? Moreover, in the case of a disaster, how would it argue that its predictions were justified and the opportunity cost was too great to institute rigorous checks? These questions don't exist for the current system. A regulator that fails to catch some medical issue is not questioned on its intentions, but instead punished for simply not being rigorous enough. That cures are slow to roll out is just the price of safe medicine.