this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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I'm generally pro vaccine. But I can understand why people don't trust the private pharma companies in the US. They have traded trust for profit. Just another reason medicine shouldn't be controlled by the profiteering ultra rich.
An epidemic preventing vaccine should be open to anyone that wants to use and copy it with the highest level of testing and oversight. Instead you have private companies making more money than god that will cut every corner if they think they can get away with it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean you don't trust the actual doctors and scientists who are not on the payroll
I trust general doctors to be able to fix things like a broken arm, do test for known ailments ect. But I don't trust them at all when it comes recommending treatment if the treatment is a pill being pushed.
And this is due to multiple personal experiences. the worst being given a near unlimited prescription opioids as a teenager after a car accident without being told how addictive they are. I will never get those years back and I was told it was safe. And other pills where side effects have cause life changing levels of harm I have still not recovered from years later and they never once went over them before giving them out. I can go on and on about all the times I've been mislead doctors.
The idea of the holy medical professional propaganda is such bs and stale at this point a quick Google search will show examples of how device and pharmaceutical companies routinely pay doctors through loopholes and they spend BIllions doing so.
The doctors and research scientists that are developing and constantly improving the technology that allows vaccines to happen is an entirely different group of people from general practitioners.
The person at the urgent care clinic down the road isn't also actively researching mRNA vaccines, that's not how any of this works.
It's crazy "logic" to distrust academia because you had a shitty doctor.
I fully agree that the people doing the work are doing legit science and improving the world, and more than I ever have by doing so. All I am saying is I understand why people don't trust the corporate companies paying the salary of those scientists.
Those companies will cut corners every chance they can if they think they can get away with it. My problem is with the profiteering ultra rich that push things out they know are harmful. I'm not saying vaccines are. I'm saying the same companies that own the vaccines are untrustworthy.
On top of that the idea that all of academia is holy and not controlled in the slightest by corporate greed is absurd.
Shit does happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_misconduct_incidents
Those companies bribe doctors and scientists all the time.
Still not a good reason to be antivax, though.
As a scientist, my colleagues and I are still waiting for our bribes.
Conservatives have done so much damage by somehow convincing (tens of?) millions of people that academia is like organized crime or some shit. Like they're shaking down pharmaceutical companies, and lying about research for extra cash on the side. It's so fucking stupid.
I think part of the problem is there are real fraud issues in academia and research, but your average American is woefully, what I'd call aggressively, science illiterate. Since they aren't familiar with even the basics behind processes like funding and peer review, their personal narrative seems to substitute whatever kinds of fraud they're already familiar with, generally theft or bribes, despite it making no goddamn sense.
Even worse, they're conditioned to be actively hostile towards it. Despite taking advantage of the fruits of all that research on a daily basis without even thinking twice about it.
So many of them take it as a personal affront if anyone even suggests that they might know more than them about something.
As a prof, can I have a bit on the side?
Absolutely, you can have half of whatever I get!
What fucking bribes?
The ones pharmaceutical reps give.
Research scientists aren't bribed by pharmaceutical companies. That's not a thing.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had access to the financials of every research scientist in the US.
OK so let me get this straight: You believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists with intimate knowledge of mRNA vaccine technology are ALL part of a conspiracy that involves them all accepting bribes from big pharma in order to lie about its safety?
That's really just not how any of it works.
Even if it did exist in any capacity, there's no possible way that it would be able to be kept secret with so many people involved, not to mention the fact that there are still scientists with integrity (I would say most of them, in actuality) who would blow the whistle immediately.
I think you need to take a step back and try to take a critical look at the reasons why you would believe such a thing, and how you came to that conclusion. Because it has zero basis in reality, and the results of this kind of thinking literally leads to people (primarily children) dying or being otherwise impaired for life, for absolutely no reason.
I never said any of that. You might want to work on your reading comprehension.
They're the most obvious implications for your bribery claims. If you had ever thought critically about what you believe, this would be immediately apparent.
All I said was pharmaceutical companies bribe doctors and scientists. That's it, besides saying it's not a valid reason to distrust vaccines.
Anything else you gleaned from that comment is you making assumptions based on nothing.
I'd say it's based on intimate knowledge of a field you obviously don't know much about. It's not our fault you're an ignorant idiot, so please consider keeping your stupidity to yourself.
So you're seriously claiming that no research scientist in the US has ever accepted a bribe from a pharmaceutical company?
Talk about stupidity.
I've got questions. So many questions.
Edit: unsurprisingly, they had no answers.
Do all scientists get universal bribe income (UBI) to hush up? Do they get bonus bribes when it's their turn to fabricate results? Holy shit, is this inadvertently the world's biggest UBI experiment? Who is being bribed not to release that data?
How do these bribes work? Do they specifically bribe researchers and all members of their peer review committees? Do they bribe lab assistants to ignore reported findings incongruent with their observed lab results?
How do these pharmaceutical reps keep other scientists from alerting the public after analyzing this fraudulent data or replicating similarly fraudulent experiments?
There are over nine million full-time researchers employed in science R&D worldwide. Even with what must be at least a trillion dollars in annual bribes, someone's bound to get a little drunk and say too much. Why don't any of them or the tens of millions of support staff blow the whistle on the whole deal?
Ex-wife was an OR nurse. The drug company reps would hang around the hospital and take everyone out to party after work. They'd sling free samples by day, $1,000 bar/restaurant tabs at night, all expensed. And they made bank.
Yea... Those guys weren't selling vaccines...
Moving goalposts? I was replying to:
And I gave an example of them bribing doctors.
No, pointing out that no one is pushing vaxx for money. Lol.
You're splitting hairs. When I go to the doc who says, "Look. I took money for a different drug from a different company, not for vaccines from this company," I'm more than little disgusted. So I can give a little understanding to someone who doesn't have the scientific background like I do when they dismiss the whole system as corrupt.
Yeah. .. but they are the same companies selling them this is well documented
The 'wellness' industry is considerably larger tha. The pharma industry and has almost no regulations
People are legit asking me and methylene blue when I start talking about health science stuff. I immediately drop what I'm taking about and say "NO!". I mean just like at the people hawking it! Do you really think liver king is running in all 3 cylinders?
sounds like anti-vaccine excuse to me lol, if this how people trying to downplay thier anti-vaxx rhetoric.