The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe

The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe sufferers of Gell-Mann amnesia?? Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power. For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions. All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.