Counterconspiracy persuades anti-vaxxer to vaccinate child | Hacker News Reader

Counterconspiracy persuades anti-vaxxer to vaccinate child

iflscience.com

8 pointskarim7910 comments

I was actually, jokingly, suggesting this approach to friends recently. If facts, reason, and emotional appeal don’t seem very effective, why not just spread conspiracies? I was joking. I don’t think this would end well (remember Fauci lying about the efficacy of masking in March/April to prevent people from panic buying masks?). The ends never justify the means, we’ve been over this time and time again. I’m increasingly convinced that rank choice voting and similar voting reforms are the only hope for the future of the US. It may seem unrelated to the topic at hand but I think it’s very related. Imagine if we elected a President in 2016 that the super majority of people were relatively happy with, and who didn’t grossly mishandled the pandemic…

I’ll have to remember this one for my next anti-vax encounter.

It’s not even really a conspiracy theory either, isn’t there plenty of evidence of Russian troll farms spreading anti-vaccine sentiment?

That's precisely why I posted. I think the ethics of such an action might be somewhat questionable, but as it says right at the end of the post, "The end justifies the means".

I did not even consider that to be honest, did not occur to me whatsoever until just now. Let's just say I have no clue, yet would not be surprised at all.

Engaging with someone as if they are a person who has a right to make their own decisions... Sounds like a great idea to me.

The "counter-conspiracy claim" here is more plausible than "tracking microchips" etc.

I think a lot of the religious debate about vaccination right now has a component of "if everybody else gets vaccinated I wont have to," because there are risks but we can't discuss those.

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."

Robert Anton Wilson

So it appears that we can infer the following..

You can tell some lies to an vaccine skeptic to make them yield to vaccination.

And amusingly the reverse appear to be true as well, that you can tell some facts to a pro-vaxxer to convert them to an vaccine skeptic..

Yeah. I’ve actually had moments of skepticism. I’m fully vaccinated (as is my entire family) but had a family member get hospitalized by myocarditis after their 2nd Pfizer dose.

When I did the math of COVID-19 prevalence in our area (cases were very low at the time) and rate of myocarditis for his age group it was actually a higher probability for him to get hospitalized from myocarditis as a vaccine side effect than from COVID-19 at that time (young athletic males seem to get this way more than other demographics).

Now… when you take into account higher cases, SIR models, the Delta variant, and that myocarditis is easy to treat it’s clearly the lower risk option longer term. There is also the ethical part where it’s the right thing to do for your neighbour and Countrymen. My point is that it is not always clear to everyone, especially those who may not have the skills to make sense of academic research.

I’ve even gotten sucked down the hole of “what happens when an mRNA lipid nanoparticle crosses the blood-brain barrier?”, which is quite interesting.

> I’ve even gotten sucked down the hole of “what happens when an mRNA lipid nanoparticle crosses the blood-brain barrier?”, which is quite interesting.

Would you happen to have any links/references to share on that subject? I'd be quite interested to read, especially since having received my first mRNA jab a week ago.

I didn’t bookmark any unfortunately but the tl;dr: conclusion I came to is that the amount of mRNA LNPs injected is so small, and so little of it will make it to your brain that it’s unlikely to cause any problems. To my knowledge there haven’t been any observed side effects that would point to this being a problem either.

Plus there is tons of evidence that COVID-19 wreaks havoc on the brain so there is that too.

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