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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long.

Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.

I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with this textbook, however, as you'd find just as many pro-science books today, and likely a number of "science is the devil"-type publications in the early 1900s.

It's an interesting read, either way, with some amusing editorializing by the article's author in the middle (no spoilers).

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> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.

That's part of what Tom Nichols has been saying: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/09/10/democracy-di...

> Our politics has become all about hurting other people, instead of trying to create something positive. We used to go to the polls and say, here’s what I’m voting for. Now we go to the polls to vote against something and we hope it makes others really mad.

This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what is going on.

To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides have viewpoints that feel very alien to the other side, so extreme that they feel like attacks but actually it's just a clash of worldview.

When one side has a repeatedly-stated policy goal like sending the military against "the enemy within" while specifically calling-out political opponents as belonging to said group, it's difficult to interpret that as a mere clash of worldview, even when assuming it's mere bluster to gin up engagement at rallies.

Right, I don't doubt that, but it's clear to me that this isn't the nexus of all of this.

What you're looking at is the later stages of a disagreement. It didn't start out that way, it started as something like, hey can we put the ketchup in the fridge, nah I'd rather leave it out, I prefer it warm. (I'm obviously deliberately being silly here).

You move on in time and suddenly blows are being exchanged because everyone loses patience.

hard to tell which side you are talking about here TBH, because while one side has talked up a big game about what they may or may not do, the other side has been actively weaponizing our institutions against aforementioned side.

Also, the loudest voices being amplified online today, along with a political strategy to pursue divisiveness, because it motivates the base to vote, while making unreliable independent votes less likely to vote.

I wonder if that's the real reason he wanted the US to start a war in Iraq: to alleviate the boredom of modern life.

I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.

> I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.

That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture novels, but those novels are just a mashup of Iain Banks's imagination and biases, and I think they're poor approximation of anything resembling reality under any set of conditions.

Personally, I think your theory would be a fun conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.

I really don't like how often I have to read/hear "Humans are built to X" type arguments.

I don't think the lack of a challenge is the root cause of science denialism. It's a cultural thing, coming from a lack of confidence in the elites. Elites are distraught when inequality become larger and things get tougher for the poorest.

Could you expound on this a little more? I think I've totally misunderstood you.

Like, who would you consider an 'Elite'? AFAICT, someone who's 'an Elite' thrives off of inequality, by definition. Without said inequality they wouldn't be 'Elite'.

Is it possible that your definition for Elite is similar to my definition for Specialist? Like 'Subject Matter Expert'?

Sorry, I wrote my previous comment after I just woke up, it's a bit messy now that I take a second look at it.

I guess the way I used "elites" in my previous comment refers more to a certain perception of society some people hold, rather than to a definite group of people.

If we take the policies implemented during the COVID pandemic as an example, those came from the government, oftentimes backed by academia. Since a lot of people think the government is doing a bad job overall, they don't trust the legitimacy of those policies and oppose the scientific reasoning that led to them being adopted.

When the economy is doing well, people put more trust into their government, or the "elites".

Therefore, my thesis is that distrust into the institutions/science comes from a general discontent of the population, and is not a natural state of humanity.

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long.

No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from experience, and one thing that vaccines do is eliminate the experiences that justify their use. That also makes the experience/knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks a lot different if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.

The other thing you should probably take into account when regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...):

> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.

I had forgotten about the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, great reminder, thank you.

Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax sentiments might be better explained by psychological and sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the amplification of fringe views via social media, or the cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract ones.

Those sociological factors aren't complex, and don't require an explanation of any real depth.

The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple majority of Americans don't understand the world they live in and never will.

That is a terrifying statistic "Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level" ... just found the research.

I'd agree with this, but it's missing something;

why is this the case? From what I know, it's a lot tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money? greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific thought?

My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy, stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.

It's the old dream of the information era. We were going to cure all of the worlds ills by fixing the problem of unequal access to information. Surely people would all perform equally, when given equal opportunity?

Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence.

Average intelligence currently seems to mean understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated effort, but that will also raise the performance of the top fifty percent.

There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.

> Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence....

> There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.

Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior, it's important to keep in mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen, get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.

When you find yourself trying to understand the world by dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me," you should stop and remember to count yourself with the idiots.

> Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior... dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me,"

I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it. I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to acknowledge that we're not all born the same.

That said, tall people will always be better at basketball on average than short people. Raising the average height doesn't really change that, and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.

> ...and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is not only dishonest, it's actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.

Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help yourself, count yourself with them and do your best to avoid condescension.

I can appreciate your perspective, but I also think the populist notion that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (to paraphrase Asimov) has already done even greater damage to our society.

It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're pretending that all people being worthy of respect also implies that all opinions are.

He's right though. People have cultural knowledge which can lead to better outcomes than "correct" reasoning even when those cultural beliefs are factually wrong. The scientific approach has blind spots where it hasn't reached, especially regarding sociology which is something long-lived cultures excel at but modern science falls flat. "intelligent" understanding has blind spots where things are too complicated to study so we pretend they don't matter. For example, do you count all religious people in your ignorant group? Even when they're having happier lives than comparable atheists?

Here's a thought. Animals often kill their own unhealthy babies but educated people much less so, and even demand that parents use technology to save them otherwise they're bad uneducated unintelligent people. Are those animals doing it wrong because they're too stupid to use medicine? Or are people doing it wrong? I'd say people have a non-scientific culture of minimizing of death even if it harms long-term evolutionary success of the species.

We're really far off topic here, but I'll bite because I'm bored.

Firstly though, we need to agree on what "good" and "bad" mean, in a moral sense. To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite. If you have a different definition, this conversation will be a waste of both our time.

> He's right though.

He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong. Reason is mans only natural defense. We were born without tooth and claw or even fur thick enough to survive a winter. We must use our minds to survive in this world, or perish as a species. To reject that isn't just a rejection of our nature, it is a form of suicide for our species.

Are you aware that the vast majority of the humans on this planet would not exist today without science? For example, the Haber-Bosch process allows for something like 90% of the worlds food to be grown. Much of the remaining 10% couldn't exist without genetic manipulation, or at the very least selective breeding. To reject science would be to accept a world where at least 90% of us starved and the remaining 10% led short, violent lives filled mostly with unending misery and toil. I'm deeply opposed to that and consider it "bad."

> The scientific approach has blind spots

Yes, that's how science works. We form hypotheses and test them. If those theories turn out to match the evidence we keep them, if they don't we abandon them. That's the truly great thing about science, science can be wrong, but it can never STAY wrong when done properly.

> Religion, euthanasia, etc...

All of those questions depend on culturally defined norms and taboos that may change from person to person or region to region. As long as a persons cultural, spiritual, or philosophical thinking is still "good" (based on my earlier definition) it can coexist with reason, and it's irrelevant. Science does not demand that you put no other god before it, that's religion.

I object only when another system becomes "bad", and in this context that happens whenever someone decides that their ignorance should be valued more than the science that keeps us all alive. It should not, and there are very good reasons for that.

> bad uneducated unintelligent people

I never said, or implied this, or many of the other things you insinuate here. Stating it yourself, and then arguing against it is a form of logical fallacy called a "strawman argument", and it's not just irrational, it's more than a little rude.

> To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite.

I agree with that definition. However, it leads to a trade-off between short term thriving of individuals and long term thriving of humanity. We could pour all our resources into supporting every living person but would cripple our future development. Or we could go the other extreme and violate all the human rights to develop a more resilient long term society. Islam, for example, is very robust for thriving of humanity (no population collapse happening there) but very poor for thriving of all individuals within it (severe penalties for seemingly harmless "crimes", women's rights, etc.).

>> He's right though.

> He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong.

You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point. How do you know I'm wrong if you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about?

I don't think you're as clever as you seem to think you are. Maybe you should consider the possibility that the advice I gave up-thread is literally true in your case, and not just a reminder to take a position of humility.

> You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point.

It takes two people to communicate. If you have trouble communicating your point maybe try rephrasing it, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.

Sorry for adding fuel to the fire, but that's not an ad hominem. He's criticizing what you did, rather than what you are.

That's one side. The other side looks like this: https://spelmanblueprint.com/810/opinions/professors-bitter-...

The background is a new faculty member actually teaching at university level. We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.

> We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.

In the context of you saying this after sharing a link to an article around difficulties at HBCUs, I'm trying to find some charitable way to interpret your statements as something other than horrendously racist. Can you please expound on this, or am I taking this correctly?

You do notice that it is the HBCU student who drags race in ("white male professor teaching at an all women’s HBCU").

Math education in large tracts of the country is not good, more so in areas plagued by rural and urban poverty, but that's no excuse to continue in the same way at college. It's sadly common that incoming students have no clue what a proof is and that mathematics isn't plugging numbers into formulas, but there's no excuse continuing that at college level, especially when it's an elite college.

But the kid who wrote the article disagrees, she demands spoonfeeding. Give me my economics degree, but it mustn't have math in it!

Interestingly, the experiences that people are rallying around (for better or worse) are more going _against_ negative effects (perceived or real) of the scientific / technological world:

* Climate Change (caused by the tech of "burning lots of fuels")

* PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, etc...

* Opiods crisis, nartotics, etc...

* Impact of GAFAM on privacy, social discourse, etc...

In a sense, the "white coats in their labs" and "nerds with glasses" have been repeatedly found (lately) to be on the "wrong side of the issue". (There are usually scientists on both side of the issue, which is the saving grace for science: self-correction is built in.)

Maybe it's relevant that the book is dated from 1929, that is, right before a time where "white coats" started being involved into very shady stuff (eugenics, mass-media propaganda, global-scale destruction weapons, and of, course, industrialized death.)

The COVID crises could have been a time for science in general to earn trust again - in some sense it did, but this time people were overexpecting, and got disappointed at least (and downright enraged at worst, if they were on the wrong side of the politico-scientifict decisions.)

And the pendulum will keep swinging, but hopefully still rise.

This is mistakenly attributing the destructive consequences of profit-motivated mega-industries to "nerds with glasses", thereby creating more cover for the ruthless profit-maximizers to continue destroying the world while deflecting all blame.

Well, in part it's the age-long debate about scientists being held responsible for the effects of their research.

In other part, it's also that the bad consequence of what the "suits" ask the "nerds" to do are becoming increasingly more visible and obvious than before.

Of course science is still helping. But it's also hurting. And I would argue that for lots of folks, the hurting is more obvious and tangible than the help.

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here.

Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yellow fever vaccine. I also don't have a problem with the COVID vaccine because it was clear that the risk of not getting vaccinated was significant. But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.

This encapsulates a misunderstanding of how vaccines work. They do not float around in our bodies for years. They work by (hopefully) training an immune response from our own bodies. The vaccines themselves rapidly breakdown. They do not last because there's no need for them to. As a result, vaccine testing - for all vaccines - pretty much only needs to cover that period. While side-effects (ranging from minor to serious and rare to common) from the vaccines themselves do occur, what's not clear to me is how well we understand/appreciate the second order effects of an altered immune system response e.g. "my body now knows to attack X, but in attacking X, it also impacts Y" - kind of thing. Where Y may be something that only becomes apparent much later.

Speaking for myself, having lived and worked in SE Asia for a while, I've had almost every vaccine known to man (the only one I'm sure I haven't had is the HPV). I've had 5 COVID shots (got COVID once in 2021) and get an annual flu-shot. The only side-effect I've ever had (that I'm aware of), is a sore arm at the injection site. I have no idea what that says about me. My mum reacts badly to most (not all) vaccines - especially the flu shots. People vary and I suspect our immune system (which I believe is poorly understood) has complex effects on the response to some vaccines.

> vaccines themselves rapidly breakdown. They do not last because there's no need for them to

The effects of the vaccines linger, by design. (Granted, in a generally productive way.)

I didn't say that the vaccine itself persists. But the effects of its interactions with the body, do persist by design.

I had 3 COVID shots; no issues with the first two. But 2 years later, my arm is still quite sore to the touch where I got my shot (and I can feel mild discomfort there even without touching it). So obviously a long-term change there.

Have you talked to your doctor about that?

> But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it.

That seems like reasonable risk assessment to me. It’s a minor chore to get but the benefit to you is also pretty minor. Lots of people skip the flu vaccine for those reasons.

But some folks skip the flu vaccine because they are convinced that the vaccine itself will harm them. I hate the term “anti-vaxxer” but if I were to apply the concept, it’s mostly to that unbalanced risk assessment.

It’s an interesting question why some folks develop such an unbalanced assessment. And I dislike “anti-vaxxer” because I think is dismissive and derogatory, and leads away from trying to understand each other.

> It’s a minor chore

It's not just that. I generally avoid taking medications unless I need to (when prescribed), which so far in my life has been extremely rare. It may not be "harmful", but I don't want to put any chemicals in my body if I don't have to. Most medications come at some cost, in that besides doing what they are designed to do, they also interact with other cells or systems in ways that may not be desirable. Vaccines are no different in that respect.

> If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.

I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer.

I think anti-vaxxer is painted with a much wider brush than that, and somehow become automatically equivalent to "anti-science"; there is overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap. Somehow vaccines have become an "all or nothing" proposition which is just as stupid as saying that all medications are created equal.

But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what labels others put on me.

That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition. Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously useful.

>Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.

And yet science says the opposite. The prevailing evidence suggests that humans are generally better suited to stable and safe environments, with danger and chaos typically leading to detrimental effects on mental health.

The word "generally" is the important one in your sentence. Genes don't know what environment they will be born into, and so they include various strategies to cope with the unknown in the hope that some will survive.

Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because chaos frequently happens.

I believe there was a study that showed a mix of behaviors because populations with cooperative individuals out-compete in plentiful times and selfish individuals out-compete in scarce times. Hard to Google now because of selfish gene theory.

D.S. Wilson did a lot of work in that area.

Yes, especially his A theory of group selection https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC432258/

The safest and richest societies are also the most highly medicated, so I would question to what prevailing evidence you refer. For an extreme example one might consider soldiers / warfighters. Very high rates of trauma and suicidality after returning from war, and this is only anecdotal not first hand but I would be interested to know what the mental health of deployed soldiers looks like in comparison (certainly there is a range of environments between 'deployed at a desk in japan' vs combat units living in 'danger, chaos and instability', so it might be a good context to study within)

> The safest and richest societies are also the most highly medicated...

That, alone, could point to two very obvious but very different conclusions.

One is that people in those societies need medications more.

Alternatively, people in these societies get needed medications more.

I suspect the average American gets more therapy than the average Afghan, but I suspect the Afghans would still benefit from it.

I think Maslow would have a point to make, here.

Privileged societies are more medicated because the most pressing issues to them are (somewhat) soluble using medication. Because they are not imminently worried about housing and sustenance or violence.

Would be odd to consider medicating for fibromyalgia or depression when you're starving and/or being bombed / shot at.

What is it about vaccines?

Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.

Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.

Yes, people can choose to do some things without wanting authorities to force them to do other things. Astutely observed.

So tired of this framing. We get it, you don't like the government. So what?

If you're spreading lies about medicine because you distrust authority...

Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe falsehoods.

But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.

Why would we have any patience for this?

Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more than any of that.

You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray. It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.

>We get it, you don't like the government. So what?

Well, if you don't trust the government, then the likelihood that you'll be willing to follow their "orders" is pretty low.

> But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.

And __this__ response is exactly why people can become anti-vaxx without having a problem with medicine or science in general (which is the question being put forward by the OP). You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, and you're an idiot for not trusting the gov" (even though governments have shown themselves to be un-trustworthy many many times -- not in the area of vaccines necessarily -- but in other domains.

So this type of urging to "do it because we're all doing it because Uncle Sam said so" is highly counter productive.

> You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, ...

What makes you think so? I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you.

Ironically, it's the person who believes the opposite of what some government says that is doing so.

> I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you

of course, but you're missing the point being discussed here, which is "why are (some) people vaccine resistant but not resistant to medication in general?"; it becomes an issue when vaccines are _mandated_ (or quasi-mandated through heavy social pressure), because that's when the trust issue comes into play.

A person who adapts their beliefs just so that they are in opposition to what some official institution is saying is not an independent thinker, but the exact opposite.

It's like when I was thirteen and suddenly thought my parent's interests were really uncool.

The reasons for why immunity to certain diseases is mandated is transparent and easy to understand.

Talk to someone with education in the field, like your doctor, rather than playing the edgelord.

In the abstract I can find the empathy in me to understand the childlike logic behind it, but like I said, zero patience for this bullshit.

> Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.

I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on everyone, which is very different than a medication that you choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are administered not for your own sake but to protect the community, and so again it's a different calculation where you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with chemicals) not because you think you need them but to potentially protect others should you become ill. Also there often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other than "the surgeon general said to".

So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem with medications in general.

It's the privilege of growing up in a society where most people are vaccinated. People have forgotten (or never seen) how horrifying some diseases can be.

Anything that people are forced to do is going to cause this sort of visceral response.

A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still stick with me and have basically made me intensely distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present before.

It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket, going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless totally unscientific bollocks.

It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.

Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of imprisonment.

Where do you live that people were imprisoned over COVID related stuff?

Some reasons I can think of:

- Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic inducing for a small number. Among street drug users, injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing only true addicts do.

- When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.

- Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there are good reasons for it.

- You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it should protect against, that's very noticeable.

- The most successful vaccines are now often considered useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare, why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is because of widespread vaccination.

It's about taking a drug when not sick, and doing so because government says you to.

Fear of needles and having your skin pierced is my guess, at least for some.

I think it's simply the enforcement mechanisms make people paranoid, especially since they are usually directed at children (by schools), it all then snowballs from there.

I agree the needles don't help though.

Of course, in the pandemic we saw extreme versions of this. Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem. If vaccination would be alternative medicine and ivermection government mandated, we might see the reverse.

So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate + preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical experimentation by the government.

A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat earthers.

> Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem.

This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.

Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?

If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.

> a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug

That just means it's safer than being infested with untreated parasites.

It doesn't mean someone without worms should take it for funsies.

Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut, even if it would be very helpful for the pain.

I'm not promoting the consumption of ivermectin without a good reason. I've never had it myself, nor have I encouraged anyone else to take it for "funsies".

Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/ instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe drug isn't generally safe.

If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.

Tylenol is absolutely a risky drug.

https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-on...

> But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk. About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said, because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary course of use.”

> Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a little less than four times the maximum daily dose can cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for ibuprofen, because so few people have died from overdosing on that drug.

> From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.

> Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000 Americans to the emergency room annually and results in 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows. Acetaminophen is also the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes for Health.

> In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the agency’s larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy of older medicines.

> As the panel’s work was going on, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals weighed in on acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975 editorial that if the drug “were discovered today it would not be approved” by British regulators. “It would certainly never be freely available without prescription.”

> Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits

except for the thousands of doctors who overprescribed opioids due to either ineptitude or their own benefit, or perhaps lack of alternatives

yeah, the Sacklers are primarily at fault, but I think people forget that they weren't handing out these pills themselves on street corners, but that __doctors__ were handing them out, triggering the biggest health crisis in America

I’m not inclined to think cutting the doctors out of the equation and allowing everyone to self-prescribe would have made the opiate epidemic better.

I agree. I'm not saying the doctors were the primary problem. I am saying the doctors were complicit (knowingly or not).

On the doses people were recommending it's very clearly unsafe, known to have killed a few people, and marked so on the usage instructions.

I agree, which is why someone should say "unsafe dosages of ivermectin" or "ivermectin in formulations unsafe for human consumption" instead of speaking of a widely used drug as per itself "unsafe" without qualification. Making over-generalized statements will lead to people rightly reject what you're saying, leaving room for them to be misinformed about the actual reality of the situation.

Oh, I do agree with this.

> A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate

Sure, some of these might be the same people, but I disagree that there's a big overlap between anti-vaxxers, which are not uncommon (I know quite a few who "vaccine resistant" which in many people's minds == anti-vaxxers), and anti-5G which is very niche (I've never met or interacted with a single person who thinks that), or anti-EV which is again a different demographic ("I want to drive my gas guzzling F-150 because Amerika is #1")

RFK Jr. is such a case. Anti-vaxx, but uses something to boost his "jackedness". The dude is jacked for a >70 years old guy. Supposedly it's testosterone. If anyone knows what he uses to look so jacked, please share.

That's what he says: “I’m on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor that includes testosterone replacement,” Kennedy said. “I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that and the TRT I use is bioidentical to what my body produces.”

I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other "vitamins"

The man is confused if he doesn't think testosterone is an anabolic steroid.

He's been convicted of heroin possession in the past.

He is vaccinated and all of his children are as well. What specifically of his statements do you consider “anti-vax”?

Not sure if you're "playing dumb" (sometimes people do that on chat boards). Kennedy isn't just "pro-choice on vaccines", he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines". Then he pivots to a more useful comment, that vaccines are exempt from the normal requirements on drugs to go through full clinical trials.

If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).

Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.

I would LOVE it if there were reliable studies about whether specific vaccines cause specific conditions, how common those conditions are, etc. The CDC does not share my interest. Instead, they mostly just publish information-free booklets that attempt to guilt trip me into getting the vaccine. My experience as a parent is pediatricians attempting to coerce me to allow the vaccination of my child AND accept legal responsibility for any side effects. That is fucked up.

I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.

At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.

In that case, you should read the book RFK Jr. published with Dr. Brian Hooker that provides a treatise on the topic, referencing 100+ published, peer reviewed studies on the topic. A free sample of the first few chapters is a available here: https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658

Of course, you should additionally read the various counter arguments that have been published, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5789217/, and likely more beyond.

> he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines".

I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.

> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.

the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.

Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.

I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".

He said it on Fox. You can go view the video here: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6330950198112

When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).

As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).

I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.

He’ll head the Department of Health and Human Services soon, little use debating what his position is here when we will see it play out soon.

I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.

I'm sorry but I refuse to argue with people on the internet who think retractions are because the state threatened an author.

Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.

Ah. Well that tells me all I need to know about your intellectual honesty.

Maybe the fact that he wants to let people choose whether to get vaccinated. That isn’t how we eradicated polio. It’s irresponsible.

So not “anti-vax” but rather “pro-choice”.

"anti-vaccinating people at the scale required to yield good public health outcomes" is sufficient to qualify for the label, IMO.

To be fair, vaccinating all humans, dogs, cats and other animals that can carry COVID-19 was never going to happen before the virus mutated, so you could also apply the label to reality itself.

To be fair, that’s not required to yield extremely strong public health outcomes, as evidenced by the extremely strong public health outcomes we saw in reality.

(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)

A lot of is the abuse of the label anti-vaxxer. It's being misapplied to people who aren't against vaccine technology.

RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."

Can you explain what you mean by "people who aren't against vaccine technology?" I'm not sure I follow given that RFK has explicitly said he is against vaccines and that no vaccines are safe and effective. [0]

===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===

===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===

===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===

[0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...

He should be more careful with his words, but they're resorting to cherry picked quotes and guilt by association to mislead:

"appeared onscreen next to"

It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is nuanced, you have to go long form.

==guilt by association to mislead: "appeared onscreen next to"==

It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.

This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.

NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.

Actually he explicitly said that he was not against vaccines.

So I guess you can take your pick.

I don't think quoting RFK is a good example of showcasing a rational view of vaccines.

The growing movement is the one that views vaccines as a categorical good and wants to unperson those who see each individual treatment as a an engineered tool with its own risks and benefits.

If you know anything about marketing you know that for such messaging to be culturally pervasive is a result of years of effort and organizing.

> humans go insane in a safe and stable environment

Weird that people still get raped and murdered in your "safe and stable" environment. Sometimes the perpetrators don't even see justice and get away with their crimes. How do you account for that?

> a certain amount of cherry-picking

Without a doubt. I don't trust authority because I've been abused by it before. I'm sure you didn't mean to punch down but that's how many of us would rationally perceive it.

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