The most vaccine-hesitant group of all? PhDs
unherd.com
unherd.com
56 This analysis used the COVID Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS), created by the Delphi Group at
57 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and conducted in collaboration with Facebook Data for
58 Good. Survey sampling is described in the eMethods. Survey weights accounting for the
59 sampling design and non-response are post-stratified to match the US general population by
60 age, gender, and state. The study design ensures CMU researchers do not see usernames or
61 profile information and Facebook does not see survey microdata.
I didn't get that part. Five million was mentioned, but there were only five hundred thousand responses. I'd guess five million were offered the survey?
>Also 2.1% of the responders had a PhD and 2.0% of the US population has a PhD, that does not seem like "a fair amount higher"
The percent with a PhD I could find ranged from 1.2% to 1.6%, and you're ignoring that some amount of the 13% of "no response" would have PhD's as well.
>They also mention that "our sample is more educated with higher vaccine uptake than general population, indicating that vaccine hesitancy is underestimated in this sample.
Or that indicates people are lying about their education, supporting my previous point. They mention that one of the limitations is that the answers just need to be taken in good faith.
So basically I will remain skeptical of Facebook surveys.
One interesting feature of the data in the paper is that the level of vaccine hesitancy in more educated people seems to have been much flatter over time than that of less educated people [0]. It's as if more educated people were more likely to have made up their minds from the start. Unfortunately, I don't think the paper provides any information on how training in different academic subjects correlates with vaccine hesitancy—a PhD can be in molecular biology just as much as it can be in comparative linguistics.
[0] Page 27: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
I wonder if it's because a larger portion of the less-educated people were hesitant due to fear, and that was relieved over time (seeing friends and family get it, seeing celebrities get it, etc).
The more-educated people on the other hand may have come to their conclusion after studying the available facts and deciding that a wait-and-see approach would be better. This would therefore suggest that not enough new information/data has be released yet to change their mind (although this might change soon with more countries hitting high vax levels and opening up).
In any case, after reading other comments mentioning that the data is self-reported, I find it much more believable that many vaccine-hesitants have falsely claimed to have a PhD. That would explain why only the purported "PhD" group is disproportionately hesitant. If it was a real effect you would expect at least some increase in hesitancy in people with Master's, who may well be on their way towards a PhD.
Educated people I suggest are more likely to accept that the CDC's conclusions are reasonable, and then maybe do a quick Google search to confirm that.
My vaxxine hesitant friends are those with no exposure to any kind of professional environment, and they believe all sorts of crazy things about what goes on within these groups.
The problem is institutions made of people are fallible, and sometimes corrupt. But those failures take specific forms: usually a minority of people, possibly corruption over money, possibly over ideology etc..
But generally speaking the CDC is not made up of people who are actively trying to secretly hiding some big studies that show it's dangerous etc. - it'd be impossible as there are 180 nations and 10x that institutions dealing with all of this.
There might be something to an 'elite arrogance' but I think it's more that it takes time for the information to come across to regular people.
I'm highly doubtful that PhD's are more hesitant, but if they are, it would be very interesting to understand why.
Assuming the survey results valid, this is what I latched onto. The act of getting a PhD may inflate ones sense of intellect and reasoning universally while actual knowledge and valid expertise is very domain dependent, leading to a more self-assured and intransigent decision making regime.
Also PhDs tend to form their own opinion on things and be quite stubborn about it (that's how they got their degrees in the first place after all :), which explains why their hesitancy didn't change much.
Useless in the sense that the probability of having severe forms is suuuuuper low, and that the argument of 'limiting the spread to older/weaker people' is not so convincing since on the long term covid will end up spreading to the older/weaker people anyway if themselves don't vaccinate. SO we should focus the effort on convincing older/weaker to vaccinate and leave the Phds/young.
Its normal young people dont want it. They only take it because they are forced somehow (mandatory masking and other stuff).
The only debate worth it is how much you have to make it mandatory
While that may sound intuitively true, what does a vaccine "being experimental" actually mean objectively?
For a vaccine to be experimental can mean many subtly different things depending on the context, and the currently deployed COVID-19 vaccines are only "experimental" with regards to the legal and customary fictions of the official procedures that are ordinarily in place for novel medications. These procedures have a reason to exist, of course, but they do not determine any objective fact about the reality of our current knowledge about these vaccines.
To rest ones trust on these vaccines on them being officially "experimental" or not is to fall into the fallacy of reification.
It's still in phase 2 or 3. it has to be beyond 4. The reason is that indeed, theses rules were put in place because it was "assessed" that this delay was necessary to proprely evaluate thre effects of drugs, based probably on past problems. As such ou "current konwledge about these vaccines" is incomplete
That was a perfectly reasonable argument when vaccine supply was limited and there was a huge number of older/weaker people needing vaccines. And that was, in fact, the approach that almost all countries took at the early stages of vaccine rollout.
But it's not a good argument now. At least not in the countries with high uptake. As the vaccines aren't 100% effective, reducing transmissibility will save lives. Still.
And it is absolutely true that the young are much less likely to get severely affected from catching COVID. And that, in a nutshell, is also likely to be the primary reason for lower uptake in the young. It doesn't affect them so they don't really care. It's an entirely rational approach, if somewhat selfish.
> It's an entirely rational approach, if somewhat selfish.
The only selfish thing is older people who say "young people should take it to protect older people". Its like saying its selfish you dont work for me for free.
My body my choice. Vaccine yourself if you want.
While the sample size is admittedly small, my own personal experience has suggested that the opposite may be true.
Also the average IQ for those doing their PhD is about 125, which is 25 points and almost a couple sigmas past average.
Moreover, anyone who has been around PhD's would see very clearly that this is the case.
Either way you're losing this one badly.
IQ and 'intelligence' are difficult qualities, no doubt, but they crudely do exist, and PhD's are 'smarter'. That's pretty much unambiguous.
I’m sorry if you actually spent money on getting yours, though. I would try to let go of the ego and accept it and not try to cope with it in a thread that everyone forgot about (the only reason I’m replying is because I’m getting reply notifications from the ‘HN Replies’ bot).
Veracity of this poll is highly suspicious.