Mark, thanks for highlighting a classic characteristic of some folks to show fear of the unknown when presented with new science, I also have many expriences like yours, all through life, and even still see now, in response to what I normally write about in Medium.

But I don't believe this is the main factor in the current mistrust we see of vaccines.

To me it looks pretty obvious that the drive for profit blinds a lot of folk to certain realities about profit driven things, things that those on the other side wish would prefer should not be talked about.

Mainly, that profit comes before lives, in most cases.

Most anti-vaxxers seem to be from less educated backgrounds, which fits with the profile you mention here, but in addition, they have watched as their classes, closer to poverty, have wtinessed firsthand the unfairness, dishonesty, and brutality of the profit driven system, including big pharma, they are survivors of it.

They know that they survive in spite of things like big pharma because they went against it, not with it.

I persnally know my mother suffered horribly because of that, and the tobacco industry until her death a few years ago, and believe I myself had a narrow escape by never taking antideppressants prescribed for me in the past.

So now they / we, when we see things being driven by profit, and start to ask some awkward questions about vaccines, which quickly became profit driven, of those pushing them most aggressively, the questions are never directly answered, of course some feel reservations about which is the wiser course of action, for them personally, and maybe also their families.

For example, we know the development work on both vaccines and tests is pretty much done, the profit has mostly been made, but the virus is still busy mutating, how do we know it has not, and won't mutate outside the fixed characteristics of the vaccines and / or tests?

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global

And in such a case, if the virus were to mutate beyond the specialised protection of one or more vaccines, how would a person. who's antibodies had become robust to covid unassisted, compare with someone else, who's antibodies were tuned to resist an older strain, but not the new?

If we were doing this truly scientifically, giving folk the choice to choose between having or not having a vaccine, given all the known, proven facts, we would then see two continuous control groups, the antibodies of whom could each be studied, and compared, to truly know who had the better protection, under all circumstances.

But no such studies are going on, because there is no conceivable return for any investment towards that, potentially bad news for the vaccine profit case, thus impacting investors.

I was one of the first I know of, to write in Medium about the need for a vaccine, before any came about, but I assumed that for a species threatening virus, the world would have one single vaccine which would be constantly worked and researched until we saw the end of covid.

I was shocked and horrified when it became clear they were being done as separate profit driven ventures.

To be honest, I don't see any good long term outcome from vaccines as stand, they have become just more big pharma, but this time with much less choice.