All those people who claimed to get autoimmune problems after the vaccine, must have been people who went to quite a bit of trouble to get the vaccine in the first place, so I'm not so sure it can all be written off as health panic.
Lyme disease has a long, storied history in alternative medicine and anti-vax communities. I would not be surprised if many of the people seeking the vaccine early were in those communities and entered with a distrust of vaccines, but thought the risk of Lyme disease outweighed their perceived risk of the vaccine. Once they got the vaccine they fixated on it as the source of their problems.
This exact pattern has been playing out with the COVID vaccine and the HPV vaccine. There are communities who are convinced that every medical problem they had since receiving the HPV vaccine is due to the vaccine, even though they’re all having different health problems that also occur in the overall population.
Are you sure you aren't retroactively classifying people in the alternative medicine/anti vax community after they report problems?
As I said, these are people who went to some effort to try a novel vaccine. If they do that, I think it's unlikely that they are anti-vaxxers. Presumably they'd also know - or would be told - that the vaccine can't be expected to work on any post-Lyme symptoms you already have.
It's a bit of a stretch to describe These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints. as "written off as a health panic".
Of course you can just say they didn't investigate it enough or whatever, you aren't trying to make a reasoned argument and thus don't need to exercise reason.
A problem with vaccines and the public is that when you perform any intervention on many many people, some will happen to (randomly) suffer some issue. To them, it is obviously causation, regardless of what the math (that they do t understand) says.
A further problem is that vaccines generally aren't perfect, some people do get sick. Some people may even die. It's a population-based approach. They save far-far more people.
Unfortunately vaccine-denialists will say 'ah this person died from getting a vaccine, we shouldn't vaccinate anyone'. Even if the vaccine saves millions of lives.
People who volunteer for a new vaccine can't exactly be called vaccine denialists. I guess the prospect of a Lyme vaccine would appeal a little more to hypochondriacs, but isn't it also possible that this vaccine sometimes triggered whatever autoimmune issues which Lyme possibly triggers? I don't want to dismiss everyone who claims long-term effects after a Lyme infection.
