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Comment by paul_f | Hacker News Reader

We should stop with the "it's just the Trump supporters" thinking. Yes them, but various other groups including PhDs. A Carnegie Mellon study identified the groups with the most vaccine hesitancy.

"independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

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Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company.

I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.

What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Or until we have better therapeutics?

> What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)?

Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.

more than 93% of the faculty, staff and students at my research institute are vaccinated.

Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.

> having a PhD or ≤high school education

This is interesting.

Having a PhD seems like a sample size issue

More like a polling one. I routinely astroturf all surveys because I hate surveys. I am both a PhD holder, I am under 21 and I am LGBTQ, A veteran, and everything else at once

Ahh, I bet you really think you're doing something to the system by being so cool.

No lol, you're flagged and omitted. Do you think everybody is as dumb as you?

good. I only do it for required surveys. I dont do other surveys

Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions?

People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.

A vital way to collect bad data, as evidenced here. Why would you trust what people say anyway?

I'd love to hear the alternative then? How would you gather data on how people feel about policy without a survey (aka just asking them), as an example?

You may be right, however one would think researchers at Carnegie Mello would know how to ensure statistically valid results.

All PhDs are not the same.

It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.

I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.

It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).

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