Most important is transparency, meaning the underlying data is available for others to verify, and that there's thoughtful rigor involved in compiling it... All of these tend to make me lean toward more established, official sources where career professionals, knowledgeable in their field and with their careers at stake provide the information.
So, based on your above criteria, should I assume that after the FDA wanted 75 years to release Pfizer safety data (which a federal judge rejected), and then scrubbed the document explaining the approval of the Moderna drug after questions were raised about references to unpublished safety data, that this negatively affects your opinion of the FDA as a credible source of information?
Based on what? I keep asking for any evidence the number of these events is unusually high.
Me, too. I ask why nobody is organizing a study to gather the evidence. We have observational data, which, apparently, I give more weight to than do you (which is your prerogative).
The one making the extraordinary claim has the burden of evidence.
I separate "claim" from "observation." If I see smoke, I call the fire department. I don't wait to see flames. I let the fire department come and find the flames.
The same thing is with observations. If I see something, I say something and then let the experts investigate it further. I'm not the investigator, but that shouldn't keep me (or anyone else, like the authors who compiled sports data) from making an observation and asking for it to be investigated.
You can't just throw out some unsupported notion and expect people to go spend resources seeing if the notion has any merit.
There is a difference between "unsupported notions" and suspicions based on recorded observations. Look at the incidents of teen-age boys getting myocarditis and pericarditis. It started out as a few hospitals noticing an increase in cases, local newspapers picked up the stories (Eight chest pain cases among adolescent boys detected after COVID vaccination in San Diego), and then the usual comments that it was either a normal amount or they had unknown health issues, until finally the CDC took it seriously enough to call an emergency meeting over it, and then studies followed.
So yes, I can expect people to go spend resources seeing if the notion has any merit.
And the part about ambiguity for denial is paranoid conspiracy theory material.
It remember the doctor at the school board meeting who asked rhetorically why, after more than eight months, there were no autopsies being done on people who died suddenly within two weeks of receiving the vaccine? He said "You will never find that which you refuse to look for." (Dr. Dan Stock, Mt. Vernon, Indiana school board meeting)
I found this interesting December 15 2021 paper at "National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)" Autopsy Findings and Causality Relationship between Death and COVID-19 Vaccination: A Systematic Review (emphasis mine):
The gist of this paper is that there are scant few reported autopsies from millions of worldwide deaths attributed to COVID-19 or related deaths. We can debate the reasons why this is the case. Just as how the CDC announced that they were no longer tracking breakthrough COVID-19 cases, or that Pfizer prematurely ended the blind study by outing the control group, there are questionable actions by important players to suggest a desire to make it harder to investigate problems.
4. Discussion[snip]
It is interesting to note that the criteria for the diagnosis of vaccine-induced death have been adopted only by Pomara et al. [26,27]: the authors adopted the proposed WHO algorithm to establish direct causality, confirming a direct link between vaccine administration and fatal adverse effects. As recently remarked by Mungmunpuntipamtip and Wiwanitkit [40], the criteria to establish a direct link between vaccination and fatal adverse effects should be standardized by the international community; in this way, the post-mortem investigation represents an essential tool to confirm all the data obtained during hospitalization.
The post-mortem investigation remains the gold standard to define the exact cause of death and the related pathophysiological processes [41,42]. The COVID-19 vaccine campaign began in about December 2020, and, at the same time, monitoring of death associated with adverse effects started in all countries. Although different fatal events have been reported occurring at the same time as COVID-19 vaccine administration, only a few papers have been published describing the post-mortem findings (38 cases: 22 patients were vaccinated with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, 10 cases with BNT162b2, 4 cases with mRNA-1273, and 2 cases with Ad26.COV2.S Janssen), as summarized in Table 1. Based on these data, autopsy is very useful to define the main characteristics of the so-called VITT after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination...[p] [snip]
Although post-mortem investigations were reported in only a few cases, it is reasonable to assume that the potential causality between death and COVID-19 vaccination had been studied in a large number of post-mortem investigations for different reasons that had not been published: the fact that only 17 papers with post-mortem investigations were published does not mean that post-mortem investigations in deaths after vaccination were not performed.
[PJ's editorial comment: I think the authors are making a BIG assumption here, not supported by facts. I think it's their "wish" that more autopsies were done and simply not reported, but they provide no evidence that this was the case.][snip]
5. Key Recommendations
All pathologists should publish autopsy reports in peer-reviewed journals or alternatively, deposit these reports in national/international databases maintained by pathologist societies; in this way, it will be possible to examine the causality relationship worldwide, analyzing other vaccines;
-PJ
The FDA is a bureaucracy. They have limited resources and don't want to spend time redacting personal information from the trial data. It isn't like the data isn't going to be released - it is. Monthly.
They claim the Moderna document going missing is a technical problem, and it may have been reposted by now for all I know, but given that it was posted once and the "incriminating" details are all in this article I don't see what would be to gain by hiding it at this point.
I'm not a conspiracy person and I don't think the FDA is engaged in one.
I ask why nobody is organizing a study to gather the evidence.
What makes you think no one's looking at this?
Public health surveillance is constantly being done by the CDC, WHO, and dozens of other organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association.
If there was a significant spike in any of these diseases it would show in the data, but it hasn't.
What we have is a few people claiming an increase with no real data behind them while those who actually review the data see nothing unusual.
I'm not the investigator, but that shouldn't keep me (or anyone else, like the authors who compiled sports data) from making an observation and asking for it to be investigated.
It is investigated. Constantly. If the spikes were happening it would show.
It started out as a few hospitals noticing an increase in cases, local newspapers picked up the stories (Eight chest pain cases among adolescent boys detected after COVID vaccination in San Diego), and then the usual comments that it was either a normal amount or they had unknown health issues, until finally the CDC took it seriously enough to call an emergency meeting over it, and then studies followed.
Do you really think no one noticed until they started seeing news reports?
the doctor at the school board meeting who asked rhetorically why, after more than eight months, there were no autopsies being done on people who died suddenly within two weeks of receiving the vaccine?
I don't think the doctor really knew what he was talking about. From the paper you cited:
"Although post-mortem investigations were reported in only a few cases, it is reasonable to assume that the potential causality between death and COVID-19 vaccination had been studied in a large number of post-mortem investigations for different reasons that had not been published: the fact that only 17 papers with post-mortem investigations were published does not mean that post-mortem investigations in deaths after vaccination were not performed. This consideration is important in order to clarify the important effort that the scientific community is still making to clarify all aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination."
I think there's more analysis going on than you think.