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.
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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.
All because of 🦀 MONEY 🦀
What is crab money crab?
It's literally a reference to Spongebob? Maybe I am finally getting old.
I was already well into adulthood when Spongebob came out, so I'm guessing I'm already old.
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.
Anti-Vaxx is more complicated than that. In Germany for instance it originates in the homeopathy and anthrosophy movements that are pseudo-science nonsense fueled by fearmongering against scientific medicine and science in general, sprinkler with other esoteric conspiracies and a good load of white supremacy.
So there is different sources and now it all mingles together because of the internet.
Fear + stupidity = conspiracy
Sadly, we have no cure for stupidity.
I guess the rest of us will need to figure out living in a world where we have conquered lions, bears, the Black Death and famine, but not yet the stupidity of our fellow countrymen.
The cure for "stupidity" is education :) Sadly this is being neglected in many countries
The cure for ignorance is education. Even PhD-holders can be stupid.
The number of highly educated idiots is too damn high.
Read Freddie DeBoer
"I'm terrified of needles, but I'm to proud to admit I'm afraid of a needle. Better come up with an excuse. Let's say it causes autism."