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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

They're not actually fine with other vaccines, they're "okay" with it because they had them as a baby without a choice. If they didn't, they would fight against it today. Same will be with COVID vaccines. It was the same with influenza. All it takes is their political party (fox news) to put out some dishonest material about other vaccines, and somehow people become self educated experts on mercury in vaccines.

Wrong people deserve to be told their wrong. They're not going to stop just because you're letting them be idiots.

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This is not true. These people span the entire political spectrum, so it's not just those who watch Fox News. Not only that, I know a few of them who are vehemently pro-vaccine, so much that they won't even let their kids play with unvaccinated kids. The issue just isn't that simple.

The whole "How did they approve this so quickly" is definitely something I've seen from people across the political spectrum.

The other one I've seen is the person who works 2 jobs, 6 days per week and can't afford to miss 2-3 days of work from reacting to the vaccine because she gets no PTO. One person I personally know in this situation finally decided to get just the first dose.

And one person I personally know changed their mind when they missed several months of work after getting infected as they started seeing double for extended period of time. Got eagerly vaccinated afterwards despite of likely natural immunity :P

>All it takes is their political party (fox news)

Have you seen the data on which demographics are unvaccinated? You would be surprised

what am I supposed to be surprised by here, exactly?

https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/r...

Here's some information from today: https://journalistsresource.org/home/vaccine-hesitancy-resea...

Source? I’d like to see this.

As of August 16, 40% of African Americans were vaccinated.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/percent-of-total-p...

I wonder how many of them are older people who were turned off by [1] or children of older people who warned them about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

This one [0] says

White adults:70% Black adults:65%

Democrats: 86% Republicans:54%

[0] https://journalistsresource.org/health/vaccine-hesitancy-res...

The discrepancy is likely due to to the vaccine not being approved for children yet; the 40% figure is misleading

Black people and conservative Republicans both have (bad) idiosyncratic reasons for rejecting the vaccines. I don’t think this data contradicts the parents point about the partisan nature of vaccine rejection.

I'm curious to see this data

Well, you're wrong. It's interesting that you think you know what goes through everyones head.

Just because they were vaccinated as children "without a choice" and refuse a mRNA vaccine does not mean they did not get the flu vaccine, or HPV vaccine, or others later in life when it was their choice.

Stop being so condescending.

They're quite loud about it, it's not difficult to know what they're thinking. "They don't know what they're making", "it's big pharma selling to you", and a thousand unfounded conspiracy ideas to try to justify it.

If they had good reasons they'd find it in actual research, not 24/7 news, podcasts, and Facebook posts.

The research into mRNA COVID vaccines is tremendous, the scrutiny applied larger than probably any other medical treatment. More so than other vaccines. Yet it's the COVID one that gets the hate. It confirms that this isn't about facts or research, it's about feelings. They feel it's bad, and someone they trust told them it's bad too.

I would argue that being insulting to a significant number of people on the basis of false assertions and strawmen is both wrong and idiotic. To each their own yeah?

"insulting" when applied corr ectly, is another word for "I don't like being told strongly I'm wrong.". If someone jumped off a cliff because they didn't believe in gravity, they're stupid. We all socially benefit when stupid things are labeled as stupid, because humans are social creatures first and rarely based on information.

>They're not actually fine with other vaccines, they're "okay" with it because they had them as a baby without a choice.

This sort of thinking is designed to "other" people and shut down debate. You don't speak for other people, stop pretending to.

Further, it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that if you have skepticism about these vaccines specifically you must secretly be anti all vaccines.

They speak for themselves. I hear it every day. You can almost see the cognitive dissonance turning gears in their brain when you ask them how they know the vaccines they got we a kid are safe in comparison to COVID. They don't actually believe or know about vaccines. In 20 years it will be the same thing with COVID as it was with influenza and any other vaccine.

This is a strawman argument. Two of the most covid vaccine hesitant groups are healthcare workers and PhD's. I'm not sure those folks are the ones with cognitive dissonance here.

To be clear: I'm not arguing that the people hesitant about the covid vaccine are right. But I see no actual data that would indicate that a significant portion of these people are anti vaccine in general.

You're making a lot of assumptions about what a very large number of people think. People deserve to be educated and treated with some sense of understanding, not blamed constantly and made idiots, because you will never convince people to change their mind by insulting them and telling them that they are wrong.

You wont convince them with information either. The only thing that will convince them is when they and the people they care about are harmed, and even then they'll blame the wrong thing.

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