Are the vaccines for Covid safe? Who gets to decide? I’ll leave the actual question of safety for another time, and concentrate here on the mechanism by which safety is decided.
In 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was put in place, purportedly to “protect” the public from the effects of potentially dangerous chemicals, ingredients and additives that people could come in contact with. This contact could happen in a million different ways; from a factory worker breathing the fumes from a solvent used in their workplace to the lotion a mom might rub on her baby’s butt – the TSCA would be there to protect us.
There was just one little problem with this whole plan – there were already thousands of chemicals in common use in 1976. Over 60,000 chemicals were “grandfathered” in when the TSCA went into effect. It was decided that it was too costly and cumbersome to expect the companies that produced these substances to submit them all for testing, not to mention the amount of government money would have been required to oversee such an undertaking.
While Wikipedia is hardly an entirely exhaustive or wholy trustworthy source of information, I’m linking the article there on the TSCA, because it offers a pretty good overview. You can drill down in the article to find information on the exemptions. Even the process of approval followed now is quite enlightening, and should inform our decision about how much we can entrust our safety to any governmental entity. Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 on Wkipedia
For me, that’s just the baseline of how the relative ‘safety’ of products is decided in this country – pretty much boiling down to, if you have enough clout, you’ve got a good chance of getting approved.
Spend enough money on lobbyists, get enough politicians to invest or otherwise take money, insuring they have a financial stake in your company’s profits, and you don’t have to worry too much about regulation.
Until people start dying.
