Sometimes it pays off to wait prudently

My main early concern about Covid vaccines was that our knowledge of them might look like this, with lots of information still to come in the months and years ahead.

What I could say definitively is we didn’t know everything. We’d been wrong about the vaccine effectiveness that was quoted when the shots were first released. There was no clinical trial data for boosters. The trials for kids were underpowered to demonstrate true risk/benefit from the intervention. And so on.

Did our lack of complete information mean the vaccines were bad? Of course not. Did it mean there was a chance the vaccines were bad? Maybe.

I tried to think about other times in history where it took a long time to learn that something was bad for us. Smoking and lung cancer. Asbestos. X-Rays and other cancers. I wondered, if the vaccine made people 1% more likely to develop cancer or heart problems sometime later in life, how long would it take to figure that out? I decided the answer was probably quite a while. I decided to wait.

Read the whole thing.  It's very good.