Are you going to take the vaccine?

[Asolsutsesvyl]

This whole debate boils down to - Do you believe the "experts" on main stream media and the government or don't you?

That's the thing, that's not what it boils down to. The landscape of ideas looks very different, and much more complex, than that.

From the start, within the mainstream, there was plenty of debate about how dangerous the virus really was, for vs. against "scaremongering", for vs. against locking down (favor the economy vs. saving a few more lives), etc. There's always a sharp distinction between the mainstream knowledge, on the one hand, and sensationalistic journalism and the general climate of emotional upheaval, on the other hand. Those are always two separate things.

Of course, as the whole COVID-19 global adventure progressed, there were majority and minority positions and groups among the mainstream experts and non-expert influential people.

Cutting short a summary of all that complexity -- just pointing out it exists -- then we still have the alternative side to look at.

There's an enormous range of alternative ideas. Some are basically sensible. Some are plainly not sensible at all. The idea of bio-weapon shenanigans or experiments towards them gone wrong may seem more or less likely, but it never seemed truly impossible to those who think rationally. The idea that 5G rays cause the illness, well, explaining it all if honestly looking at all the data will be quite a challenge. On the nature and contents of the vaccine, there's lots of speculation introducing varyingly wild ideas with very little evidence.

The possible wrongness of a set of mainstream views would point in a very general opposing direction, but does not automatically mean that a particular subset of alternative views are right. Also, logically, there's a very vast range of contradictory alternative explanations. Plainly, logically, most of them must be wrong, even if some of them would happen to be right -- this is recognized by all honest debaters.

So logically, it is already certain that most of the alternative views are wrong, even if some are not, since they clash so much. And evidence is very thin for the wild claims offered in discussions like this thread as alternatives for the mainstream. So your question at the start can of course be turned around: Do you believe the "experts" with alternative messages and their fans/champions or don't you?

Well, at this point, it's clear that if you're going to reject the authority of mainstream experts, it's simply silly to not also reject the authority of the alternative experts. But often people don't do that, and go by an absurd double-standard instead, accepting wilder claims on thinner evidence as soon as it comes from sources further away from the mainstream.

(Also, generally, in times of crisis, the following is always basically normal and to be expected, but is never evidence for any specific alternative view: Sensationalism in the media, lying politicians, rushed answers and changing official positions, and temporary mass hysteria in society.)