[devjab]

There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore.

I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.

Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.

[Vecr]

It depends what you mean by "antivaxer", what is the subclinical myocarditis rate for ACAM1000 again? (Not ACAM2000, I'm very specifically talking about ACAM1000)

[Thorrez]

>There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though.

Read pages 4,5,6 of this vaccine insert[1]. It seemingly says a large percent of infants have adverse reactions to vaccines (up to 85% for some vaccines and symptoms). An anti-vaxxer can say "I won't give my kid a shot that has a chance of causing an adverse reaction."

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/74035/download

[matheusmoreira]

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.

It's simple. They don't trust authorities on the subject. They don't trust authorities in general. They feel lied to and manipulated. In many ways, that's the fault of the authorities. They are prone to simplifying things in order to get their consent.

During the pandemic I witnessed government officials proclaiming that there were no risks associated with the vaccines. That's just false.

Everything is a risk/benefit calculation. There is no 0% and no 100%. Things are vastly more complex than they seem to be. Yet these authorities insist on simplifying things for the layman in order to manufacture consent for their public policies.

These people aren't stupid. They will find out. When they do, they will never listen to you again. They will actively resist you.

[jcranmer]

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.

The motivation for anti-vaccine--and flat-earthers, for what it's worth--is basically the same thing as Q-Anon. It's all primarily based on feeding on peoples' feeling of a conspiracy against them. It's not being pro-measles, it's thinking that the vaccine is a cover for the government trying to collect your DNA or euthanize your children or something, and there are all too many grifters who are willing to ride the wave of such thinking and flog their own products on top of that. Don't use the government's cure for COVID, buy my COVID cure for only $50! And I'm not the government or an evil megacorporation, so you know I'm trustworthy.

> But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.

It's... not really harmless. There's a path from the flat earth stuff to the January 6 riot.

[m3047]

Imagine someone asks you: "If I flip a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds it comes up tails on the 100th toss?"

Do you say 50%, or do you dismiss their prior? At what point do you dismiss their prior or them, entirely? You don't have to dispute the mathematics, you just have to get bored with the impracticality of the question: it will never happen. Maybe they should flip that allegedly fair coin until it comes up heads (or tails) 99 times in a row and get back to us.

It's reasonable to ask what confounding factors are at play. It's reasonable to have a null hypoothesis.

[seabass-labrax]

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.

I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology.

However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.

[EnigmaFlare]

Ironically, this is how popular beliefs are supported, but I don't think anti-vax is one of them. The news tells people what they want to hear to keep them engaged to make money from advertising to them. That's why news organizations are split into partisan groups, they have to do that to serve their own markets. Anyone being neutral would alienate most of their audience by making them uncomfortable.

Remember when the correct belief about the origin of Covid was naturally occurring in an animal then spreading to people in a market? Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false. But the news kept telling people that because people had already formed political attachment to that belief.

[defrost]

> Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false.

Did it now?

Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-...

Even with money on the line and an arsenal of medical expertise and documents that's not a case that can be conclusively made.

[EnigmaFlare]

I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1].

Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-o...

[defrost]

From your link:

     underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.

"My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many qualified onlookers, experienced judges, and $100K USD at stake on the outcome.

You may feel the article is biased as the (qualified) author clearly thinks lab leak is an improbable origin, you can go to the actual debate record being discussed and judge whether that was a fair pitting of one viewpoint against another - great lengths were taken to ensure a fair playing field in a debate for a cash prize.

Nobody is certain .. that's your ongoing strawman in in all your comments here so far, but the probabilities with all things considered very heavily fall on the natural origin side.

The best arguments put forward for a lab leak being more likely failed to carry the day.

It's still possible just very unlikely and certainly not certain.

[EnigmaFlare]

It's not a strawman, it's your real man. It's the first sentence in the article you cited.

The conspiracy I'm talking about is the one described here: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory."

which identifies the misinformation's origin here:

"Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet.2 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” "

[aredox]

The FBI doesn't know ("likely" isn't a proof, it is not even a certainty). When Trump was in power, why hasn't any conclusive proof published?

[shiroiushi]

Maybe I'm a little behind on this stuff, but I thought that it hasn't been conclusively proven either way (lab leak or naturally occurring). The lab-leak hypothesis was shouted down in mainstream media early on because they didn't want to offend China, but I don't think it's ever been conclusively proven that it wasn't a lab leak. However, there hasn't been sufficient evidence to back that hypothesis either.