From something you said in one of your long posts: You said the CDC made a mistake about masks in the early going of the covid. If by mistake, you mean they were factual, then yes - they let their mask slip by being honest and freakishly enough following the science by stating that masks were ridiculous against virons.
But regarding the vaxx; I believe the FDA made a general statement about vaccine safety back in September 2021. They put it out in pictures to make it easy:
No earthly idea how you may interpret the hieroglyphics 
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Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do
Most, but not all, of what I've read about masks would indicate they work to help prevent spread of COVID-19. Here's something hot off the presses:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm
I've got no doubt that when properly used they were a plus. If we'd had enough KN95 masks and the like around at the start of the pandemic a lot of businesses might have stayed open. Take the meat packing plants as an example. COVID wiped out the whole work forces in multiple plants and so we were stuck with meat shortages.
As to VAERS, you and I have been back and forth on that many times. I'd point to this:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...se-events.html
And this:
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/12/sc...iven-vaccines/
From the second link:
the huge number of VAERS reports following COVID-19 vaccination and relative paucity for other vaccines is likely mostly due to a reporting bias. For one, because the COVID-19 vaccines are or were at first authorized under an emergency use authorization, there are much broader reporting requirements for health care providers.
For the COVID-19 vaccines, health care providers are required by law to report any vaccine administration error; any serious adverse event following vaccination, regardless of the suspected cause; any case of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome; and any COVID-19 [vaccine] case that results in hospitalization or death.
In contrast, with all other vaccines, providers are only required to report select adverse events, including the so-called reportable events for each vaccine that occur within a certain time period after vaccination, such as an allergic anaphylactic reaction.
LexusLover is fond of describing people who died of gunshot wounds, whose deaths were attributed to COVID. Well, apparently, something like that would actually fall under the criteria for reporting a death to VAERS. If someone dies from a gunshot after getting the vaccine, then theoretically the health care workers are supposed to report the death to VAERS. I doubt they'd do that, but in any event if someone dies from something like a heart attack after getting a vaccine, and the doctor thinks that was totally unrelated to the vaccine, the death should still be reported to VAERS
I kind of agree with you though. The CDC underplays the risk from vaccines. Listening to them you'd think they've only been able to tie back 20 or 30 deaths to the vaccines. My guess is that there have been several thousand, most of them really old and feeble people who would have died from COVID-19, the disease, anyway, if the vaccine or something else hadn't gotten them first. That's from ramping up a Norwegian estimate of how many people died in their old folks homes from the vaccines, to the number of elderly Americans.
The risk reward ratio though is still off-the-charts great. If you assume as you do that every one of the deaths reported to VAERS were attributable to the vaccine, then you'd have around 11,000 deaths to date. The Commonwealth Fund estimated 1.1 million lives in the USA had been saved by the vaccines through the end of November, BEFORE the Omicron wave. So you'd have less than 1 death from the vaccines for every 100 lives saved.
Now you're going to question the 1.1 million lives saved, but that's not an unreasonable number. You have to date 900,000 deaths from COVID in the USA. Sixty-five percent of the population is fully vaccinated. The percentage of the fully vaxxed people who died of COVID is much lower than the percentage of the unvaxxed who died of it. If you assumed, for example, 800,000 out of the 900,000 COVID-19 deaths were among the 35% of individuals who weren't fully vaxxed, then the vaccines would have saved substantially more than 800,000 among the 65% who were fully vaxxed.
Here's another recent piece, that addresses how much more likely an unvaccinated person is to die from COVID. During October and November of 2021, unvaccinated persons had a 53.2X higher risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to people with booster doses. And 12.7X higher risk of dying compared to people who were vaccinated but didn't have boosters:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm
I don't think those numbers are good going forward, since so many of the unvaxxed now have immunity from infection. But still the data show, in 2021, you would have been wiser to get vaccinated.
And why the fuck would you listen to Benjamin Braddock anyway? His only claim to fame was banging Mrs. Robinson.
