EDIT: more respectful title.

So my FIL isn’t really all that terrible politically-speaking, and was even one of the human trial volunteers for the original COVID vaccines (can’t remember which).

However, he did spend much of the larger pandemic years obsessively watching youtube videos by a handful of people claiming to be doctors who would do weekly news updates on stuff like vaccination progress, covid mutations, just general “pandemic content” which also seems to have covered side effects and concerns with the vaccines.

That’s to be said, that now if current COVID vaccines are mentioned in any way he’ll mention stuff like “heart problems” and “lung damage” and “rolled out too quickly” etc. which comes off (to me) as anti-vax paranoia, but I also don’t really know how to properly research this shit myself because I’m not an immunologist!

Of course there’s the usual capitalistic bullshit with COVID vaccines as there are with other vaccine programs, such as how the imperial monopolized the vaccine efforts to exploit it for $$$ in the global south (and in turn, created an endless pandemic hellhole). However, in terms of its safety and effectiveness I can’t say I buy much of the claims because we’ve seen how even this botched vaccine rollout correlated with massively reduced hospital admissions and long term COVID effects.

EDIT: I’ve added a few links I’ve found while researching this myself in the comments. I hope some of this info is useful to people other than myself, and hopefully I’ve understood some of it properly. I didn’t want to ask a question like this and not do any work on it myself!