Indeed the brainwashing is still alive and well.

It’s been five years since multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available and administered worldwide, and just about the worst common side effects have been a small risk of mild, self-resolving myocarditis in mRNA vaccines and an increased risk of clotting for adenoviral vector vaccines which have been either discontinued or fallen out of use.

Past those, there have been rare (~5 per million doses) cases of Guillain-Barré or anaphylaxis, but those are broadly in line with risk profiles for other vaccines.

Despite repeated insistence from chronically-online nutjobs, the sky has not fallen, and the well-known, well-published, and well-studied risks of these vaccines remain drastically lower than the risks of actually contracting the disease they inhibit. Which is the whole goddamn point.

To make it more explicit. Censorship is always bad. There is no censorship for the good of the people. If fewer people had gotten vaccines because we didn't censor claims it was dangerous, maybe more people would have died. Maybe hospitals would have shut down from crowding. We can't know for sure. But because that was censored, amongst other things, the trust in government dropped even lower. This in turn is allowing populists from both parties to win and local state and national levels. Populists always hurt the economy and damage individual freedoms. There is no substitute for trust, and it is a generational project to rebuild it. Censorship of any speech errodes it and harms all of us more than letting people who are probably wrong speak.

Provide proof of someone getting arrested for a social media post.

Lying is not free speech.

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