This is completely false. Areas of the world with much lower vaccination rates like India and especially Africa has much lower death rates from COVID than Western countries with much higher rates of vaccination.

During the pandemic, the media was talking about how much death there would be in these under-vaccinated countries, and then it turned out their death rates were much lower.

The trials missed the fact that younger males under 40 have a material increased risk myocarditis from the vaccine. And when reports of that started coming out, the media and "medical establishment" fought against those reports and said the people who were saying this were "anti-vaxxers". But finally the CDC acknowledged this and added it to their communication without accountability or apologies.

Their reaction was anti-science and driven by ideology and things like this is why trust in the media and medical establishment was destroyed because it was highly visible.

> This implies that corners were cut. They were not. They went through the full regulatory procedures.

That's absolutely not true. The standard for new vaccines, iirc, required a period of something on the order of 7 years. Time, in this case, is not a function of procedure that can be expedited in an emergency, but is actually an important element in and of itself. Many issues do not manifest immediately and actually need follow up over time.

The crazy thing about these vaccines was that both mRNA vaccines and the viral vector vaccines were completely new platforms, never deployed at scale. They work entirely differently than all other vaccines. Up until this point, vaccines all delivered the antigen in one of 3 ways: you get a weakened virus, you get a dead virus, or you get the antigen itself (subunit protein like Novavax). Both the mRNA (Pfizer & Moderna) and the viral vector (J&J) vaccines worked by getting either mRNA or DNA (viral vector) into your cells, and then having your own cells produce and express the antigen themselves. Basically the difference between server generated code or shipping the JS for you to run the SPA on your own client.

One of the crazy things about this was that it wasn't obvious what the implications would be of having our own cells expressing the antigens (and thus flagging themselves for destruction by our immune system). This was particularly concerning because the cells that were shown to be doing this, despite the complete lie that kept being repeated of the vaccine staying localized at the injection site, were found all over the body. In the case of the viral vector vaccines, at least they were being delivered by a vessel (living adenovirus) that our bodies have had billions of years of evolution to determine where they might end up. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, though, the vessel was a lipid nanoparticle with an exceptional ability to deliver payloads basically anywhere in the body. Note: the attention these lipid nanoparticles had received prior to their use in mRNA was their ability to deliver payloads to places that are notoriously difficult to reach, notably their ability to cross the brain blood barrier. So you have delivery mechanisms delivering a payload that makes our cells into antigen factories, shown to be producing them all over the body, and targeting themselves for destruction by the immune system/causing an increased immune response in these areas.

And then, for the icing on the cake, there was mounting evidence that the antigen itself was actually likely destructive/problematic.

I could go off forever on this topic. The amount of obfuscation and gaslighting was insurmountable for anybody that was even remotely interested in figuring out what was happening. From a personal perspective, my trust in many institutions was permanently shaken.