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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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”.
Yeah...God could make a bunch of rocks that look exactly like a skeleton, but random chance can't make amino acides...
At least that is consistent with the "god gave us free will to test if we are good" bullshit.
They find it perfectly reasonable to do with the bible. So why not with news, science, politics, math
Huh, my first thought is that there also have been extinction events in the past. The Permian-Triassic (known as the great dying because, well, almost everything died) was largely caused by methanogenic bacteria (algae? I'm rusty), so yes, biologically induced climate change.
In our case, we have industry to help us along, so we did in decades what a sea full of microbes took millenia. Still, they killed nearly everything.
Over the course of billions of years, there have been many extinctions and the environment has gone from one extreme to the other many times. Humans might not survive events like that, but life in general does. If you want to truly eradicate all like, you would need to drop the moon on earth and turn the whole planet into a lava inferno.
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.
Nonsense. Legitimate concerns, like yours, are none of the reasons why they do what they do
No one wants to admit it of course, but the people I talked to about it fit the pattern very well.