I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.

> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”

This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?

When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.

> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time

This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.

The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently.

The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.