The parent never mentioned a conspiracy. They did mention running into a lot of glibly dismissive dead ends researching their concerns.
I don't think their decision is unreasonable. I'm personally not looking at the same factors, and think of covid vaccination differently. I'm guessing you do, also. I personally don't see a problem with that. Who am I to tell force someone else to my way of thinking?
Being dishonest isn't a hallmark of rational thinking either. The Covid-19 vaccines are observably dangerous to some persons[1], however rare that danger may be. The rational thing to do is to weigh the risk versus the benefit. If you really want hesitant persons to get vaccinated, you're going to get a lot farther by being honest about the risks of the vaccines, the risks of Covid-19, and showing why, for their circumstances, getting the vaccine is the correct risk management strategy. And frankly, for young persons with acquired natural immunity, the risk of myocarditis and other adverse effects isn't worth it for a disease they are already immune to.
And I'm going to annoy people by saying that. I'm baffled why the existence of natural immunity, which is completely settled science, has somehow become controversial. If the mechanism for natural immunity didn't work, then the mechanism for vaccinated immunity also wouldn't be able to work. Believing that the vaccines can work but the immune system response to the live virus doesn't is some serious irrationality.
Edit: And the response is a wonderful demonstration of Aristotle's ancient observation that those in the grips of fear cannot be persuaded by facts or reason.
Irrational exuberance for the vaccine drives some people to doubt.
The vaccine is a very reasonable thing to get but that doesn’t mean everyone in favor of it is behaving or thinking rationally.
When you have people turning something reasonable into a quasi religious moral obligation it is going to attract opposition, behaving irrationally is harmful even for something which is a good idea.
Exactly, I'm just pointing out that there were (and still are in my opinion) valid scientific and rational thinking for being hesitant of getting the vaccine.
The problem is that they're clubbing people who were unsure about the Covid vaccine with people who think that all vaccines are bad.
That's an absurd stance to take. It's entirely okay to be skeptical of a vaccine that was made at a rapidly accelerated pace and that hasn't been out long enough to know about its long-term causes.
You can't apply the same safety profile to the Covid vaccine as you can to, say, the Polio vaccine.
Since someone just self-censored, I can only repeat that. As a young healthy individual, I'd much rather catch COVID then get vaccinated with a wide-spread mRNA experiment. In my childhood, I have been used by a doctor for an experiment without consent of my parents, and this cost me my remaining eye-sight.
You can bash, downvote, laugh at, deminish, and in general say whatever you want about sceptics, our reasons to not want to be vaccinated are as valid as your reasons to want it are.
I'm open to having my mind changed, but it takes rigorous testing and peer review. I'm not going to have my mind changed by some talking head on the TV or some dude in sunglasses recording a video from his truck.
If I got COVID, I'm not going to demand Ivermectin just because Joe Rogan told me to.
But you're dodging the issue at hand. COVID has killed nearly 700,000 Americans and over 4.5M people worldwide. Vaccines slow the spread of COVID and are safe. This is all verifiable information. Claims that the vaccine is ineffective or has deadly side-effects are disinformation. Not because I disagree, but because extensive study and peer review points to those claims being false.
When you disagree with scientific studies that have undergone extensive peer review, it's not disagreement. You're just wrong.
As I posted a few times here in this area so far, vaccine fear isn't rational. It's also amazing to me that so many people who are against vaccines really think that people who are getting vaccinated have been manipulated to do so, but that their decision to avoid a vaccine is well-reasoned and not the result of manipulation by people with anti-vaccine sentiment who profit from spreading misinformation in society.
Here is a link that I have shared now with many people, including people I know who were against vaccines. It nudged a few people to get a covid vaccine.
Because they often aren’t rational people. Are you unaware of the conspiracy theory. Ring passed around that people who got the vaccine are now tainted?
No, we, who are rational truth-seekers, are the ones who were gaslit for 2+ years about the whole idea of "natural immunity". Despite having had covid and recovered from it, we were still told we needed to vaccinate even AFTER recovering from it.
I find it interesting that the people that call other people irrational and say things like "follow the science" ignore things like the fact that a whole lot of people died from being intubated before the doctors (the smart people, right) figured it out. Or the "science" that said the vaccines are gonna stop covid and it's important that we all get it so we can go back to normal but then we all got it and oops it doesn't actually stop covid at all and uhhh oops it turns out we didn't even test for that...
I'd say there is some rational middle ground, and over reactions on each side.
Personally I'm sympathetic to people who are hesitant about getting a new vaccine. But I'd consider any sort of conspiracy theory to be irrational. (Though I think you miss the point that many people don't agree with someone else telling them what medical treatment to take, but rather than articulate that will cling to less sound arguments and when these are debunked fall back to another, which is I think what you're seeing). But I'm sure there are people who harbor some irrational fear of vaccines or unsupported thoughts about how they work
At the same time, there are also people who have gone crazy with covid fear, and believe no ritual is over the top to protect themselves or to signal to others. People walking alone with nobody around wearing a mask, people taking hand sanitizing to extremes, people who insist we all get vaccinated but also continue to wear masks, people who think their healthy kids should wear masks at school, and as I'm inferring from the post, people who despite an infinitesimal risk still want to have a say in what others do and worry about "safely" visiting or whatever. The original post is just as crazy as people worring about side effects from vaccines, which is my point.
Being skeptical of a hypothetical like that is fine. Once the vaccine came out and was shown to be efficacious, they updated their opinions with the data. This is exactly the manner in which one would hope, and indeed expect, their political leaders to behave. To do otherwise is pure reality-denying insanity.
I was also very skeptical of the speed at which a vaccine could be created and rolled out. But, once it was rolled out and it was shown to be reasonably safe, certainly far safer than actually getting COVID, I went and got the jab. These are not hypocritical or diametrically opposed viewpoints and actions. They are the behaviors of someone living in reality, with all of the uncertainty that entails.
Well sure there are some concerns that might be rational causes for concern, but to come to the conclusion that the pros of vaccination are exceeded by the cons is not anywhere close to rational.
Questioning the covid vaccine because it was not fully tested and the technology has had a history of issues was completely rational.
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