Every time an antivaxxer can point at science or a scientist and say “Look! They’re lying to you!” that’s a real loss of credibility it will take years to win back.
There might be problems with this one particular COVID-19 vaccine. Let’s not play that straight into the antivaxxers hands by being obviously dishonest about it.
If there’s causes for concern, we obviously need to investigate those concerns and be open about it.
> The researchers note their findings conflict with ongoing campaigns to promote trust in science as a way to fight misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing and COVID-19 vaccines.
If you trust in science, you know that ordinary surgeon's masks and cloths cannot protect you from viruses. You also know that the COVID vaccines are experimental and have no long-term studies done on them. You also know that the risk of dying from COVID below an age of 40 is about as high as winning a large sum of money in the lottery. You also know that highly vaccinated countries like Israel had COVID cases explode, making you wonder how exactly the vaccine protects the people. Trusting the science means trusting the scientific method, not trusting some random authorities who have every financial and political incentive on the planet to claim what they claim.
It is perfectly fine to discuss the adverse effects of vaccines, but it is not good faith to open the discussion with a conspiratorial tone. Billions of shots have been given. That is a tremendous amount of statistical power to discern problems. There are also millions of deaths from confirmed COVID alone. It helps no one to even hint that somehow the side effects of vaccines are comparable to the real disease.
That’s your opinion, but in the article there is a quote saying scientist law are literally afraid of making a mistake and it being grasped on by the anti vax crowd and taken for something it is not.
>” Probing possible side effects presents a dilemma to researchers: They risk fomenting rejection of vaccines that are generally safe, effective, and crucial to saving lives. “You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” ”
- Set up a strawman caricature of your opponent's (well, so it is claimed that CT's are opponents) argument, and then demolish it.
- In the name of Science (which is supposed to be based on pure evidence and logic)
I imagine this is part of a campaign to increase the public's psychological buy-in to a COVID vaccine, so perhaps the ends justify the means in fact....but still, it seems like this propaganda disguised as science technique is starting to get used a bit too frequently, to the long term detriment of science's reputation. The CP world is a hivemind, and there are some weaponized autists in there who have compiled information and articles for years, and certainly know the actual science behind vaccines & their historic risks far beyond what your typical self-proclaimed scientific-thinker thinks they know. So when propaganda hit pieces like this come out in that world, and someone drops a bomb of 50+ contradicting factual articles into the thread, opinions are formed and solidified.
It's a shame so many adults seem to have forgotten what their parents told them about lying.
None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?
Just because lots of people do it doesn't mean it's a rational thing to do. As i see it, the only thing that matters in science is to be factual. If we stop being impeccable with our words, we are no better than the conspiracy nuts.
To say that the evidence would have been here now is simply not true because we can't possibly know WHEN symptoms will present.
What would be more appropriate would be to say that in the time frame from when people started getting vaccinated until now it doesn't seem like the vaccines are causing to many serious side effects. That is fair to say. What about in 5 years? We DON'T know. This is a fact.
Seriously. It hurts me to see the "anti-vaxxers" term thrown around so loosely. There are very legitimate reasons for being skeptical of vaccine research. Events like this appear quite frequently [1]. It is not at all in the same league as "flat-earths".
Going to suggest that rather than mudslinging, you do the work of looking at VAERS [1] yourself
Alternatively, you could use VAERSanalysis [2], or Openvaers [3]
In this spirit of openness, here is also an NPR article [4] on VAERS data quality/verification issues, and how the data may not be considered high quality, that anti-vaxxers use it to spread disinformation. I'm adding that specifically because it is the contrary opinion about the quality of the data and I believe in an open debate. I am not an anti-vaxxer, being up on all my vaccines, and then some due to overseas work, along with one experimental vaccine, but not covid vaccinated yet.
We don’t understand nearly enough about Covid, long Covid, or breakthrough cases to draw any conclusion about how much the vaccine mitigates the severity of long-term outcomes in breakthrough cases.
We have enough information to form an educated guess. But your attitude here is exactly why public health authorities have damaged their credibility and that of science itself in the past two years. They have repeatedly misrepresented their educated guesses as scientific fact - and then turned out to be wrong.
That's not what's being questioned. It's not about the vaccines effectiveness. It's about Trust.
The point being, this type of "science" being published like this (i.e., absolutely no recognition of its bogusness) only widens the trust gap. It only confirms the perceptions of those with questions.
Put another way: Why are so many "journalists" and "scientists" repeatedly going to such extremes based on so little?
Regardless of what you do or don't believe about Covid, the vaccines, etc. this pattern of propaganda should be a concern. In time the pandemic will pass. On the other hand, these type of behavior normalizations tend to persist. No one should be comfortable about such things.
Remember when pharma companies rolled out a vaccine in record time with nearly zero safety or efficacy studies and claimed it was both safe and effective and got lots of media and researchers to parrot the same. And then when asked for data they said it shouldn’t be made public for something like 50 years? And then we learned it wasn’t nearly as safe as claimed and a lot of the impossible to spread from the injection site claimed were untrue at scale and whatever measure of effectiveness used didn’t include immunity or transmission. History is littered with junk science claims by entities with financial incentives. Unfortunately, there are probably also incentives to identify risk in competitors products.
Unfortunately, “science” has done a good job of discrediting itself lately and shown to be susceptible to corruption, influence, and outright fabrication. How can anyone trust a paper discrediting another any more than the original research when the liability associated with those harmful effects would be astronomically damaging to influential organizations?
I don’t have any issues with most traditional, dead virus vaccines, but also have no trust in pharma or even public institutions to do what’s in the public’s best interest when it is not aligned with theirs or causes other harm to them.
We need more pharma sceptics, imho. They hold a considerable amount of power over the population and take in absurd profits in the process. Anyone who challenges that will be misrepresented and maligned publicly, if not removed through more violent means. I’m sure Kennedy’s know that more than most dynasty families.
Then there will be response articles which expose those errors as such, a consensus will be reached and we will move on to other issues. That is the nature of scientific discourse. Expecting everyone to shut up just because you shout "ANTIVAX" is not.
I'm pretty pro covid vaccine. But I don't think your thesis is correct. VAERS tells a very different story. Even if the signal is overstated by an order of magnitude, it's still an incredibly important signal. The CDC is also concerned enough to have ordered Pfizer to undertake a multi year study as well.
We don't do any favors in terms of convincing people to get vaccinated by pretending or minimizing the potential risks. People see through this kind of dishonest behavior.
> You can also find plenty people online saying vaccines include 5G microchips, the british royal family are lizard people, the world is flat, and that fossils are a ruse to shift the world's attention away from the existence of falling angels.
Straw man...
So you can't find any truth online because someone has told a bad fish tale somewhere?
So you can just lump anything you don't like into a crap bucket and stop thinking. Nuance, evidences, reason and logic are all just irrelevant because, well, there is this giant crap bucket!!
Back on topic...
Go to any front line medical personnel. Nurses, doctors, doesn't matter. Tell them you know someone who claims to have been vaccine injured by the COVID vaccines and is worried about the booster and ask them what they think.
How many encourage the person to report their condition and get it investigated?
How many dismiss the concern because vaccines are safe?
If they were interested in truth and safety, potential side effects would be treated with concern and care. To at least look at it, acknowledge the possibility. You know, get answers to questions that every researcher or scientist should want.
Or... If they are more interested in the narrative, it will look more like the later dismissal. No questions allowed.
It's an exercise anyone can do. And it will tell you quite plainly if we are getting honest reporting on potential issues from the vaccines.
Because... You can't find what you filter out of your data set.
I had a sign at my university entrance asking a vaccine status or current test as a "negative proof for covid19". As in your vaccine status proofs you dont have covid19.
Any scientist who isnt deeply ashamed of this should really get the money for their degree back.
Pretending that vaccines are in any way safer then or as safe as actual tests is simply horrific.
Circular logic. Vaccines can injure people, it's a fact. I've seen it first hand with a relative of mine get an hepatitis from a vaccine. Trying to silent that just foster conspiracy theories, because once trust is lost it's hard to rebuild. So better not lose it by hiding scientific and medical facts.
> How can you possibly know that, if no person in the world had the MRNA vaccine more than 2 years ago?
That's what antivaxxers are asking. I'm not one of them. I ask, how can you know that the fact that you were exposed to covid won't cause cancers or strokes in few years or whatever if nobody had it more than two years ago? And you can skip arguments like it's just a flu because it isn't or that it's natural therefore not that bad as artificial vaccine because it makes your body do way more things it shouldn't do.
> The numbers are a small minority, but there are bad possible effects like ITP and other immune reactions, myocarditis, and other clotting issues, which are happening to _some_ people.
As I said, research whether vaccine raised the probability of those events occuring for those people is inconclusive (because numbers are so small that it's very hard to tell the signal from the noise) and even assuming vaccine had some role in some of these cases there's exacly zero proof that they wouldn't just got the same event or worse once they contracted covid.
> It is this tendency to obviously outright lie that makes a lot of people who would not otherwise be "anti-vax" mistrust the current massive push to force everyone to take these new vaccines.
Nobody lies about this, same way I'm not lying when I say you will not a win a grand prize in powerball lottery. Even though some people do, you won't, and more people die in traffic accidents when they drive to buy their lottery ticket so you have a better chance of that happening.
> Every time someone like you blows off these truths, they create more anti-vaxxers out of people who have had a bad reaction to a vaccine or know someone who has.
Everytime someone pays inordinate amount of attention to such extremely rare cases, when someone got some issue after they took vaccine even though there's no proof it had anything to do with that beyond possible faint correlation, even though there's no possible mechanism of vaccine causing anything that the virus itself wouldn't cause ... whenever you do that you are creating thousands of antivaxxers and cause people to make very bad decisions for themselves, their loved ones and everybody else.
There might be problems with this one particular COVID-19 vaccine. Let’s not play that straight into the antivaxxers hands by being obviously dishonest about it.
If there’s causes for concern, we obviously need to investigate those concerns and be open about it.
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