Yes, it really is that bad. It was already that bad even before the pandemic and before things got politicized.
I recall once at a (2018) party, a friend told an anecdote about having a weird and serious side effect from a common, old psychiatric medication, which wasn’t a listed side effect. A psychiatrist at the party said they had a patient who had the same side effect from the same drug, and had looked into it at the time and thought that wasn’t supposed to happen, and asked if he could share the anecdote. I asked if he had ever tried reporting events like that, and how that worked. He said that there was theoretically a system for doing so, but he had never used it, nor had his colleagues, and it wasn’t a thing in practice.
Against that backdrop, you have a vaccine adverse event reporting system, and a society polarized into a group that wants to glorify them and a group that wants to demonize them. A the same time, side effect rates are (I think, based on super sparse data) very different between different age demographics, and between people who have had COVID recently and who haven’t, and between the different vaccines. On balance I think it’s still quite clear that getting vaccinated is better than getting COVID, and getting vaccinated and getting reduced-severity breakthrough COVID is better than getting full-severity COVID, but most institutions seem to be choosing “downplay side effects as much as possible” rather than “honestly talk about the balance of considerations”.
(That said, not all of the things you point at are actually that bad. Estimating the fraction of cases which are of a variant is easy, much easier than estimating the number of cases in the population as a whole, because all you have to do is set up a sequencer in a lab that was already doing PCR tests.Estimating the exposure-to-infectious time period is not as trivial, but the serial interval is a good substitute metric, and that can be easily estimated by asking positive cases when they think they were exposed, and taking the subset who seem confident in the exposure date.)
Yes, it really is that bad. It was already that bad even before the pandemic and before things got politicized.
I recall once at a (2018) party, a friend told an anecdote about having a weird and serious side effect from a common, old psychiatric medication, which wasn’t a listed side effect. A psychiatrist at the party said they had a patient who had the same side effect from the same drug, and had looked into it at the time and thought that wasn’t supposed to happen, and asked if he could share the anecdote. I asked if he had ever tried reporting events like that, and how that worked. He said that there was theoretically a system for doing so, but he had never used it, nor had his colleagues, and it wasn’t a thing in practice.
Against that backdrop, you have a vaccine adverse event reporting system, and a society polarized into a group that wants to glorify them and a group that wants to demonize them. A the same time, side effect rates are (I think, based on super sparse data) very different between different age demographics, and between people who have had COVID recently and who haven’t, and between the different vaccines. On balance I think it’s still quite clear that getting vaccinated is better than getting COVID, and getting vaccinated and getting reduced-severity breakthrough COVID is better than getting full-severity COVID, but most institutions seem to be choosing “downplay side effects as much as possible” rather than “honestly talk about the balance of considerations”.
(That said, not all of the things you point at are actually that bad. Estimating the fraction of cases which are of a variant is easy, much easier than estimating the number of cases in the population as a whole, because all you have to do is set up a sequencer in a lab that was already doing PCR tests.Estimating the exposure-to-infectious time period is not as trivial, but the serial interval is a good substitute metric, and that can be easily estimated by asking positive cases when they think they were exposed, and taking the subset who seem confident in the exposure date.)