A lot of this I already tried to answer as we went.

I will say I looked for an all cause mortality comparison. I can't find it. Disappointing. Search results are all about the covid vaccine and I already said I won't piss on that electric fence.

The best I can do is point to a rise in global life expectancy after the invention of vaccines. A lot of other things changed so I won't declare that to be a final answer. I'm here to share truth backed with real evidence not just say what I think will win the argument for my side.

I think a lot of your misunderstanding comes from wanting a binary yes or no answer to things. Science simply doesn't work that way. Each bit of scientific knowledge has a little imaginary probability attached to it. Higher or lower probability based on the quality of reseach and number of studies that align with that fact.

We're always building that body of knowledge and that means that probability for each "fact" MIPis always changing. If you don't have an intuitive sense that those probabilities are there and what they are for different current scientific beliefs it is rough. You'll never understand why sometimes a challenge to existing science is met with a laugh and sometimes it gets a maybe.

If you do grasp that you can see why I say sure the data isn't gold standard but this model has more data showing how it aligns accurately with observation than any other model for this thing, so we let it ride here.

Once upon a time there was a visualization of this concept rating various supplements by meta analysis of existing studies. 1 axis showed confidence rating of the average study and bubble size showed how many studies there were. I can't find it now but the mental model stuck with me. Also holy shit take Creatine for sure no excuses no other supplement was even close.