xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers
xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers
Title text: The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.
Transcript
[Cueball, White Hat and Megan walking]
Cueball: I try to meet people where they are, but I have such a hard time with anti-vaxxers.
[Zoom out; a tree to the right is visible]
Cueball: The pandemic brought with it so much confusing stuff.
Cueball: Ambiguous data, weird tradeoffs, disagreements, dilemmas, and uncertainty.
[Zoom in on Cueball]
Cueball: It just feels like a miracle that the best and most effective intervention to reduce suffering also turned out to be one of the easiest and simplest.
Cueball: That never happens!
[Cueball, White Hat and Megan sitting around the tree]
Cueball: I hate that people are working so hard to make it complicated when it's one of the few things in this world that isn't.
Pick and choose science.
Some one claimed that they knew climate change was a hoax because there have been Ice Ages in the past.
So, you believe the scientist who tells you there was an Ice Age 60,000 years ago but don't believe the same person when they tell you that climate change is real.
I told someone I don't believe in their magical sky creature, I believe in science. They told me the "magical sky creature created science", so then I asked why they are against science if their God created it?
Never got a response. Religion is just picking and choosing your way through life while using a magical sky creature as your scape goat.
That’s so easy to answer though. They’ve been using the explanation for a while.
“God made science to test our faith”.
Those people usually choose politics over science.
On the political side, governments forced the vaccine on people by taking away freedoms if they didn't get it and they often did that before there were enough vaccines for everyone.
As someone with Asthma (who should theoretically get some kind of priority), I spent two months illegally meeting with my friends because I couldn't get a vaccine while the politicians who decided on the rules could have legal meetups because they were the first ones to get the vaccine.
And on the priority? My brother got prioritized as a high-risk patient and got his vaccine before I did. The reason? He's slightly overweight.
Anyways, my point is that a lot of covid antivaxxers didn't actually care if the vaccine was any good or bad, they just cared about the politics surrounding it. And I agree with you, picking science over politics always the right call.
I think people are just afraid of injection in general. And someone took that small fear and turns it into conspiracies and what not.
As far as i know the fear of vaccines started growing because of Andrew Wakefield.
Andrew Wakefield developed a vaccine against measles, however the MMR vaccine was already on the market doing its job just fine. So how could he make sure that his vaccine was taken instead of the MMR?
He had to start lying. So he started to spread the notion that the MMR vaccine would cause autism. My memory hets fuzzy from here on but basically it was MMR vaccine causing autism because it would mess with gut bacteria and to prove that he was messing with data and his colleagues and until they realized what was happening the damage was already done. And over time the lie from Wakefield turned into the commonly known "vaccines cause autism".
Hbomberguy has a very comprehensive video about it: https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc
As a small correction from the video itself: it isn't just that he wanted to sell the individual vaccines, it's that the parents of the kids that underwent tests wanted the investigation to go through to sue the MMR vaccine company. It was all a sham from the beginning.
He never even had to serve prison time for any of this.
He did have his medical license taken away, which was basically the band minimum they could have done, but really he should have faced prosecution.
Except the risk of serious side effects from the vaccine is higher than from COVID, in healthy young individuals. But keep believing everything the authority figures tell you, I'm sure it will work out great. And btw, the vaccinated still got sick and transmitted the virus even when asymptomatic so yeah.
Why should I trust you more than "the authority figures" ? What are your figures that I should trust ?
Why should I trust some unknown person on the internet that give me some facts without any evidence ?
Why shouldn't I trust the data that has been gathered by global scientific communities, validated by experts, cross checked by pairs, some of them I've read and understood myself, and also relevant to my actual observations ?
Because they're bought out frauds, their data is fraudulent.
Darkwolf in the explain pages is a fucking retard. And he earned the slur. Antivaxxers are plague spreaders.