Re: The echo chamber at work...
Thalidomide _is_ perfectly safe... if you're not pregnant. Specifically, if you're not at a specific stage of pregnancy. So it's perfectly safe for 50% of the adult population 100% of the time, and for the other 50% 90+% of the time. It's hideously unsafe for the last few, though. Or rather for the fetuses the last few are carrying.
Seriously, look up aspirin and penicillin. If either of them had been first proposed in a modern testing environment, neither would have been approved. They'd never get past the animal testing, one kills guinea pigs and one blinds rabbits. (I don't remember which, and reading about it was too depressing so I'm not digging up the article again.) Penicillin is fatal to a small percentage of humans, and will make another small percentage very sick indeed.A lot of people have problems with aspirin (I'm one of them...) And yet both of them are still in use... (I can handle low-dosages of aspirin. Some others can't even do that.)
There's a long list of drugs which will cause problems in a small percentage of people. A very long list. (Any diabetics out there? Let me just mention metformin. And that one is by no means the most egregious example...)
'Vaccine hesitancy' _is_ irrational.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
