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.
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.
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
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.
"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."
they reject it precisely because it's not ambiguous or confusing, for some of them that's because they want to be the other voice in the room, for others it's because it validates other beliefs they have (belief in the international jewish conspiracy, or a belief in god, or a belief that trump is god for some of them)
The discussion on the explain wiki page makes me sad. So many anti-vaxxers
I only saw one and I'm not convinced they're a scientist as they claim. Most of the other people seemed reasonable enough.
I didn't know the different stick figures had names
Antivaxxers are the same nutjobs who have now latched on to the muh ayylmao congressional testimony. The same people who shat on one authority figure (Fauci etc.) are now worshipping another (Grusch).
Because the one authority says to trust in science and it is complicated. The other authority says to just follow his gut and you dont need to bother with logic anyways because fuck nerds. Also you are so smart for listening to it and all the other people are dumb.
So of course the idiots like to listen to the second one.
Haven't been keeping up to date with this. Has there actually been an uptick in cardiac problems due to the vaccine? I know my resting heart rate was chronically elevated, seemingly after I caught the coronavirus and continued distance running without realising. And I was fully vaccinated already. What's the current evidence on all these claims? And what should I be doing, as somebody trying to improve their cardiovascular fitness?
There is a tiny percentage chance that you will develop myocarditis, temporarily, if you get vaccinated.
There's a greater chance you will develop myocarditis if you get COVID.
Antivaxxers are cartoonish characters created by the media to discredit those who opposed people in power. People like Trump or Bolsonaro said a lot of stupid and wrong things on purpose to discredit all the arguments. All the antivaxxers who appeared on the media are no better, actors playing the role of the idiots.
The opinion of the real opposition is:
COVID19 vaccines were available when the overwhelming majority of people already developed the antibodies on their own, therefore they were useless.
Viruses of that family mutate so frequently and are so contagious that there is no way to develop a vaccine on time. They will always arrive after people already came into contact with the virus and fought it off on their own.
Also the lock downs started after people already had their course with the virus and fought it off on their own. Lock downs were politically motivated, they saved absolutely nobody.
The story of the heart conditions looks like another false alarm to distract the attention from the real problem. Until now we used vaccines for a limited number of serious diseases and the vaccines were carefully tested over a long period. That was a sensible way to use vaccines because the mechanism is still not fully understood by science. Imposing by force two vaccinations every year with untested vaccines means playing too much with a mechanism we do not fully understand and nobody knows what the long term consequences could be.
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.
Agreed but let's not call people slurs if they "earned it" lmao. Would you call a black person the n word if they did something particularly bad?
I have no expectation behind wolf's actual mental impairment the same way the N word would expect it, since it exclusively only targets black people. So no, I shouldn't use it, but using it doesn't justify any other slur the way you imply, either lighter or worse.
And with that said, I'll use it anyways. Because, fuck it, I despise people like that, double down time. Someone should take anyone who makes antivaxxer media or argues antivaxxer rethoric and institutionalize them IN THE MORGUE.