The "vaccines are riskier than claimed" argument he lays out is a poor one. He says that "vaccines are safe" is what you say when you really mean "vaccines aren't perfectly safe, they do have negative side effects, maybe they have far more than we've ever thought, but that on balance vaccines for a population are safe and we have to spread the risk. So you're taking a risk and we expect you to do it just the way we expect you to be conscribed into an army when there's a war."
I don't think people who say "vaccines are safe" mean the second thing at all. This is an attempt make an unreasonable claim seem reasonable by couching it in a big picture philosophical framework that is true. Yes, the logic behind the lawful or reasonableness of vaccine mandates is an extension of the state police power as he describes. But no, this doesn't justify the hand-wavy description of vaccines as having "far more side effects than we've ever thought." That's a separate thing he presents without support or critique.
Even ignoring that, the argument itself isn't correct. Being conscripted into a war increases your personal risk of death while armies (in theory) reduce the aggregate societal risk. On the contrary, both in the aggregate and in the individual metric vaccines reduce risk. Simply put, people are not being asked to take a personal risk for societal benefit. They are being asked to lower their risk profile while simultaneously lowering collective risk. He didn't do some grand favor to society when he took a vaccine, it wasn't a personal sacrifice. Framing it like that and using that framing to paper over an assertion that public policymakers are "lying" about vaccine safety is just wrong.
On the flipside is this is actually an excellent argument against lockdowns. There you have individual burden at a mismatch for societal benefit (most of the downside on the young, most of the upside on the old). But not for vaccines. For vaccines they're well aligned. You could make a case that for a certain subset of the population - for example, potentially those at low risk for covid complications and a high risk for myocarditis - they're not well aligned. And this is precisely where you see some conversation going on. That's the area we should be focusing in on.
If you're going to say something like "there are concerns about the vaccines, its not wrong to be concerned about the vaccines" you need to bring evidence. Saying - correctly - that policymakers aren't trustworthy, or that the Federal government has no legal authority to mandate vaccinations, or that weaponizing OSHA is wrong, and so on, doesn't demonstrate that there is any reasonable, evidence-based, scientifically justifiable basis for being "concerned about the vaccines" or to be afraid (his words) that the vaccines aren't as safe as claimed.
There is a fairly small contingent of people around the DarkHose podcast that have done a huge disservice to this country by fomenting fear, uncertainty, and doubt about these vaccines. The part that is really egregious is that while doing so they have personally profited from tapping into the existing fear from the unknowns of the pandemic and have leveraged that into significantly increased celebrity and success. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone running a podcast which has sat at the top of the Apple podcast charts with millions of listeners is somehow unaware of the breadth of their influence.
Also - sorry for dismissing it out of hand. I should have listened instead of reacting to the title, and I was being a jerk. Apologies.
