[the_af]

> friendly reminder that this is factually false

The anti-vax crowd is complete nonsense. Regardless of any actual side-effects or concerns about the actual medicine and science of vaccines, the anti-vax crowd is still conspiracy theory nonsense. They don't go at it rationally, and no discourse is possible with them.

[tim333]

I discourse a bit. I feel it's my duty to debunk a little. Usually it's not hard - a brief googling shows the meme of the day to be junk.

[the_af]

I believe it's not possible precisely because the underlying mentality is one of "they are lying to us". So you debunk the meme of the day and the next meme is waiting for you tomorrow, repeated by the same people.

You gain nothing by debunking today's meme. No lesson will be learned because the problem is not one that can be solved by reasoning. No general conclusions are drawn. It's tiresome and futile, and ultimately the anti-vaxxer crowd just "wants to believe"... in conspiracies.

I find it's also not always as easy as you put it to debunk crap. It requires time, effort, digging up numbers, comparing statistics, etc, whereas making shit up takes almost no effort.

[thu2111]

In this case, the authorities actually are lying to people about vaccines, just in the opposite direction than the one than usually hypothesised (i.e. claiming it's dangerous and useless when in fact it's safe and effective).

This fact - and it is undeniable, heavily documented fact by this point - unfortunately will make anti-vax theories far more prevalent and influential in the coming years. The way that EU governments and "experts" are willing to lie at every level about vaccine safety is by now completely established. Simply watching national governments disagreeing with the EMA, with the outcomes of US trials, suspending then resuming vaccines etc demonstrates this beyond doubt. The trustworthiness of expertise and the authorities is often the primary argument against anti-vaxxers and that argument is now on fire. New arguments need to be found, but what? How can trust be recovered after this?

[tim333]

Dunno. Here's one I prepared earlier https://www.reddit.com/r/Wuhan_Flu/comments/m979pb/28year_ol...