Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing.
America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons. They're convinced that they know the secret capital-T Truth, and that spreading their gospel saves lives. COVID brought it mainstream, but if you look back at the "Anti-vax Moms groups" long before COVID, there was still no hesitancy. Their minds were also made up.
This is the activist wing of the movement. Many more Americans are genuinely, in many cases reasonably, hesitant.
The vaccine-hesitant group is much larger than the anti-vaxx group, and the anti-vaxx group wields a very disproportionate influence on the undecided, vaccine-hesitant group, than actual real expert groups do. We know this.
I think we actually know the answers to these questions but we're too frightened to tackle the problem head-on.
(biochemist, no conflict of interest)
Why? Are you saying they're too stupid to weigh up the facts?
The amount of factual evidence is enormous, and it's a trivial exercise to evaluate it accurately.
Edit: Actually, it’s not just HN. It’s quite unfortunate.
My original comment was based on anecdotal data tho. None of the people I know that refused the Covid vaccine (initially) had any issues taking other vaccines. One friend for example who was a vocal critic of Covid vaccines, didn’t have any issues vaccinating his child this year against other things.
Basically they wanted a vaccine with a “track record” was my conclusion.
When you lump these type of people with people who think the vaccines are from the deep state or stuff like that, you can’t create good and effective policies IMO.
The origin of the term "vaccine hesitancy" is actually scholarly research on the subject, not the media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
And more recently there's Piers Corbyn and co
José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, the founder, CEO and president of the European pharmaceutical giant PharmaMar, a pharmaceutical company that creates and distributes drugs to treat coronavirus, was caught with fake paperwork that stated he was fully vaccinated.
I am not sure why someone leading a large pharmaceutical company would decide not to take the vaccine and pay a large sum of money to get fake paperwork with the risk of being caught but he was also obviously VERY hesitant.
You would think he knows better...
Note that the German health minister was also caught lying about his own vaccine history. He claimed to have taken a fourth shot but then rather stupidly flashed his own vaccine passport on TV, so other people scanned it and found he'd actually never done so.
Given these sorts of facts the truly disturbing anti-rationalists are out in abundance on this thread, and they're not the hesitants!
It may be depressing, but it's not helpful to associate it with "science skepticism".
The vaccine "hesitant" you refer to are not skeptical of science. They freely use the language and processes of science as their argument. You or I may think they misuse the language, make unconvincing assumptions, etc, but there's nothing to it that's skeptical of science.
Where vaccine hesitancy is rooted in science skepticism, you see the hesitant relying on alternative means of knowing why vaccines aren't right for them. You can think of the classic faith healing communities l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶S̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶J̶e̶h̶o̶v̶a̶h̶'̶s̶ ̶W̶i̶t̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ as an example of that.
The contagious skepticism that you're talking about is of institutions and authority. They don't trust Fauci or the CDC or the WHO or Pfizer or whomever to to communicate honestly, objectively, and in their own interests. They believe that these institutions can not be trusted to communicate scientific knowledge free of political bias.
And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that. While responsible for founding some impressive modern institutions, the founding myth of the nation is all about skepticism of institution and authority. The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself, and that's what's getting exported now.
Let's also not lose sight of the fake vaccine operation run by the CIA in Pakistan to catch Bin Laden. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
You can say that's a good and admirable thing, but it also takes a revolutionary tension between people and government and structures into the national identity.
Words are different than the things they refer to. Using "sciency" words doesn't neccesarily mean people are following the scientific method just like how soverign citizens aren't actually lawyers.
What matters is the meaning of the words, not what they superficially sound like.
* to be clear, im not saying that all antivaccine people are neccesarily anti-science, just that the superficial form of the words they use is irrelavent.
If it helps to situate it in a different truth system: Heresy may be wrong according to the prevailing doctrine or theologically unsound, but it's still operating within the religious system of belief.
Professing belief unitarianism is not atheism, and making unconvincing or unsound scientific arguments is not anti-science.
Actually it's worse than institutions just using science incorrectly. They just flat out make up scientific sounding claims. The claim that everyone had to take the vaxx even if they weren't elderly was rooted in claims that the COVID vaccines would create herd immunity by stopping transmission. Go try and find the underlying scientific evidence that led to that belief - there isn't any. They just made it up because they knew it'd cause the Vaccine True Believers to force everyone around them to take it. And those people were now revealed to not only be idiots: the vaccines have never stopped transmission, but in many case flat out evil authoritarians as well.
[1] https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20101001/Do-Jehova...
[2] https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-vaccines-imm...
[3] https://www.christianscience.com/press-room/a-christian-scie...
>And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that.
Yes, we Americans are a distrustful bunch. But there's more to this outcome than just being a stubborn, cranky and untrusting people.
As Peter Medawar[0] described[1]:
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools,
colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special
religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty,
that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous
harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put
together.
The tragic situation in New York with respect to polio is all about the intersection of religion, power and control. People seeking that power need it attack the credibility of government institutions because they are a threat. If people die or suffer, so be it. It’s cynical and gross.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
Fun fact, the Omicron BA.5 booster isn't tested at all.
The "decades of public use" metric needs to also take into account how widespread that use is.
Now consider how many doses of mRNA vaccines have been given worldwide (1), since the public rollouts began in December 2020. mRNA vaccines are no longer unknown, at all.
1) Billions of doses https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...