My point was that planting the poison pill of "Are vaccines dangerous?" is itself dangerous, and despite the video's good intentions might still apply here.
As a popular video, it'll appear in sidebars more than it'll be watched. I worry that in that capacity, it'll maybe snare a bunch of no-vaccination believers in the honeypot, but will plant the safety question into the minds of many more.
My concern is tempered by the understanding that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation knows what it's doing here, but the choice to make an informative campaign clandestine strikes me as an odd one with potential negative side effects.
In an article at
https://medium.com/@Kurzgesagt/kurzgesagt-sponsorships-on-yo...
Philipp Dettmer, the founder of the channel, explains that he insists on editorial independence when accepting sponsorships to create videos on specific topics (including in this case, with the Gates sponsorship). This seems to suggest that the Gates Foundation did not choose how the video would be titled or promoted on YouTube, just that it entered into an agreement that it would sponsor the creation of an engaging video about vaccine risks and benefits.
I don't know if anyone at the Gates Foundation specifically thought about the question of whether simply mentioning this topic in a certain way would encourage some viewers to think that the risks were worse than they are. Even if so, it's not clear that they would have a veto according to their sponsorship agreement.
(The article also indicates that people can also hire the team behind Kurzgesagt to make videos to a customer's specifications. In this case, those videos don't appear on the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel.)