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It’s a valid opinion. The principle is regulatory capture and it happens when a regulatory agency isn’t competent and effective enough to remain independent in its acquisition and evaluation of knowledge. Likewise, the “capturing” is not malicious but happens when the pharmaceutical company persuasive over time, or, in extreme situations, when it appears to have the only solution. This can be exacerbated by inherent limitations to the industry in question, e.g. the difficulty of conducting long-term medical trials in an emergency. Regulatory capture is a natural drift and so believing it has occurred does not require believing in a conspiracy.

(I haven’t studied whether it’s happened in the case of Pfizer boosters.)

In the case of covid vaccines there's plenty of real world data and lots of governments, universities, etc. running different studies all the time. Pfizer would be stupid to fake some initial data because it would be very quickly found out once real world results didn't stack up. For example, this thread you're commenting in is about research from a prestigious London university which found 3 jabs provides better protection than 2.

It wouldn't shock me at all to find out examples of pharma companies including Pfizer acting that way, but in this particular case of Covid vaccines there is evidence and plenty of reason to believe that it's not the case and you don't have any counter evidence, so no it's not a reasonable opinion it's just a conspiracy theory.

For sure. I don't think regulatory capture would be about faking data, rather, interpretation to the end of best improving public health (in this case) at the appropriate cost. Again, theoretically.

Don't think of it as a top-down conspiracy. Think of it as an alignment of perverse incentives.

New variant comes out, CDC is pressed to propose a solution. Pharma companies come in and say "here's a study we did ourselves showing that our own product provides some improvement." CDC recommends pharma product for lack of any better ideas.

You can reasonably imagine getting this result whether or not the booster actually provides more than a marginal improvement.

Are all these studies and conversations from or led by pharma outsiders? If so can you provide any evidence of that? I mean it sounds like people are starting with a strongly held belief that there is a conspiracy and everyone is evil/corrupt (true of pharma I admit), then accepting, rejecting, and constructing arguments and evidence just to suit their preexisting beliefs which in turn have simply been constructed to serve their own goals and world views. Whew, well maybe this theory of why people believe what they do about covid and govt is me constructing self serving conspiracies. Shit is complex, but yeah this is my theory because otherwise I'm completely baffled that mostly smart people seem to be acting so completely irrationally.

It's because of human psychology.

You start off with a small group of "vaccines cause autism" crackpots, and they're irrelevant. Because vaccines still cause R < 1 if 90+% of people get them even if some single digit percentage of crackpots refuse.

But the crackpots are really loud and refuse to be defeated by science or logic. So some genius decides that what we need to own the refuseniks are vaccine mandates.

From a human psychology perspective, this was an incredibly bad idea. Because now you've gone from fighting seven lizardmen crackpots to fighting millions of regular people who don't believe in non-consensual medical treatment and can point to a long list of historical precedent for why that's a bad idea.

They literally changed the dictionary definition of "anti-vaxxer" to include people who oppose vaccine mandates:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

So now that you've put millions of people on "the other side," they are, by human nature, going to follow confirmation bias into being more likely to believe anything that helps "their side." So now large numbers of people start to believe that vaccines are dangerous and people should be afraid of getting them and they're less effective than claimed and they're only getting pushed by greedy pharma companies to make money, because that's what helps "their side" so they're more inclined to believe that it's true.

Conversely, the other side dismisses the possibility that any of those things are true for the same reason, even if some of them might be.

Yup. I'm twice vaccinated but still labeled as an anti-vaxxer because I show skepticism towards for example vaccinating young kids and I'm outright against vaccine mandates, to the point where I will refuse any boosters just out of principle.

Big Pharma mobilized an armies of people and equipment to create vaccines in record time to save lives, but people still like to shit on them.

I just think we would rather use the doses already produced before they spoil than wait for the new ones.

> You really think the CDC and other govt and NGO organizations, as an international coordinated group effort, are in bed with pharma companies, plotting with them to craft false recommendations, just so those farma companies can make more $$?

Yes.

You believe this based on what real world evidence? Or is it just your feelings?

Because if you're not using logic to take your current position then it'll be impossible to use logic to convince you otherwise and nobody should waste their time.