[southerntofu]

Disclaimer: i'm far from an anti-vaxxer and i have a scientific background (though not in biology).

It's often hard to establish scientific consensus. When it's not hard, it can take a long time. Cases such as climate change are as easy as it gets: models are always a flawed approximation for reality, but denying climate change on a scientific basis is almost impossible nowadays because we have too much data and too many converging studies.

About a century ago, the "scientific" consensus in the western world was that there were different human races with very different characteristics, and phrenology was considered a science.

The question of who establishes the ground truth, and who checks the checkers still stands. Science advances by asking sometimes inconvenient, sometimes outright weird questions. And sometimes the answers provided are plain wrong (but not for obvious reasons or malice), which is why reproducibility is so important.

I don't think any entity should have the power to prevent people from questioning the status quo. Especially since censorship feeds into the mindset of the conspiracy theorists and their real truth that "THEY" don't want you to see.

[jamwil]

There’s a difference between questioning the status quo and spreading obvious misinformation. Did the vaccine save lives? Yes. Did misinformation about the vaccine cost lives? Yes it did.

[southerntofu]

For sure, in retrospect. At the time, Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked. And there are laws to requisition supplies and strip medical patents as public health measures.

The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.

I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.