| "You're confusing ideology" No, you are. I said science and explicitly held myself to the topic of science. You said you never met anyone willing to talk about the science, and that is all I addressed. "You have made no scientific claims or scientific arguments." And you are 100% utterly, totally, completely wrong. I told you, science isn't about big words or biochemistry or any sort of why, it is about what. Before vaccines, disease. After vaccines, nearly no disease. Causality established via details I didn't go into but you are free to investigate, at this point they are plausibly common knowledge. THAT'S SCIENCE. That's it. Right there. On the topic of whether vaccines are a net good, that is the argument. Mechanisms are irrelevant. Whys are irrelevant. And the reason science works that way is that it avoids exactly the error you're trying to induce me into, where we bring various bits of "whys" to bang against each other until we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and whether Pisces are more likely to marry Tauruses or Cancers, and all the other massive cognitive errors that way of thought creates, by valuing "explanations" over facts. The fact is that where vaccines go, deaths go down, and no amount of arguing to the contrary matters. This is exactly why science is so important, because it's one of the few ways known to prevent the error you're stuck in. You're the one offering up psuedoscientific approaches and freely conflating ideology with the simple matter of how science determines the most likely outcomes for things. It is certainly a common delusion that science is about why, but the why comes later; once you establish that vaccines prevent disease, the next study hypothesizes a reason and tests that hypothesis, but no amount of fancy hypotheses will change the previous results. You don't see science because you can't recognize it, not because it doesn't exist. You're asking for the ounce of proof and noticing the metric tons I'm handing you in the form of every living person who would be dead without them, in the millions. You may very well be one of them, even if you weren't vaccinated. Mercifully, we'll never have to find out. (I actually freely admit the fact that vaccines are incredibly powerful and effective does not immediately prove compulsory vaccination is moral or correct, but I'm not addressing that, by choice. Science first, moral reactions to scientific results second. Neither step can be skipped but they should never be done out of order.) |