There is not a single ideologically valid defense for being anti-vaccine. It's just anti humanity, anti science, and anti life.
Before the pandemic, I heard some weird things from older Slovaks, such as EU has decided that kids must name their parents "parent1" and "parent2", and if they don't they will take your kids away. Absolutely bonkers.
Then during the pandemic, all the typical anti-vax rhetoric really took hold there, like crazy.
Then after the pandemic, all those anti-vaxers all of a sudden got pro-Russia. Which makes no sense when you think about that, because both have nothing to do with each other. At that point, I realised Russia was doing their campaigns way before covid already, but it got an extra boost thanks to it.
And now Slovaks elected prime minister Fico attended the Russian military parade.
The ironic part is that these anti-vaxers like to call the rest of us "sheep", but in the end they are the sheep that are lead straight to the slaughter house.
Is it "Enemies of the USA are deploying social media based psyops that destabilize the country by astroturfing propaganda?"
That's an interesting idea, probably true, but also sounds like a conspiracy theory. Even if it is true, how would we know to what extent it affects public opinion?
Or maybe you're referring to something else.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-us-election-interferenc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
I am not antivax but can we please stop pretending like our government and health authorities didn’t royally screw the pooch as it related to the COVID vaccine communications, mandates, etc…?
People became more anti-vax largely due to the prior administration more than RFKjr.
So there may not be a scientific defense but there damn sure is a backlash because of poor leadership.
What happened is that our country is extremely polarized and one side picked vaccines, masks, and lockdowns, so the other side took the opposite stance.
Then the vaccine, mask, and lockdown side reacted by leaning farther in (probably a bit too far near the end of things).
On the one side you had people yelling about masks causing them to asphyxiate and on the other you had people wearing masks alone in the car.
We don't even seem to be learning in retrospect. I've yet to see one article from health officials to the public about how they could have done better and what mistakes were made.
But if only sick people had to wear masks, it would single you out as sick, so nobody would wear a mask.
So the solution is for everyone to wear a mask, so a mask isn't a sign of illness.
Of course, this level of thinking requires an IQ of at least 100, which half the population is under.
So "Wear a mask, because masks stop the spread of illness" is used to allude to masks being a tool for protection primarily, rather than a tool of containment.
How’s that working out so far?
Now you are suggesting it was all some form of performative behavior modification theater? It’s no wonder our public trust in our health authorities has decreased.
- He said masks are not effective because they aren't. Surgical masks won't stop much and N95 needs special procedure to use properly. 95% of people clamoring for masks would be healthy unsick people who want protection from the virus, which masks aren't that great at (in general public hands).
- At the time people needed to stay home and medical workers who understand masks and using them properly needed them. There was a huge shortage.
- The number of sick people going out in public, the ones where a mask is very effective (picture a sweatshirt hanging over a garden hose, now spray someone with it) would be very small, requiring very few masks.
- If the public understood that only sick people needed to wear masks -no one would wear a mask- Health officials deeply understand this. You kill your whole program if the public associates masks with being sick.
Fauci had no lies, maybe misteps, but he could not reveal the true motivation of "Wear a mask" (stated in the line abaove) because it kills the whole initiative(as stated in the line above).
So now, lets see who can clear the hurdle:
How do you as a public health communicator get all sick people to wear masks in public?
Fauci was stuck in a game theory problem, and you need some hidden information (which I now revealed) and mild intelligence to understand it
Sorry, but I am not going to assume mastery and genius that manifests itself as incompetence. Feel free to call me low intelligence.
It's totally understandable that you were not aware that public masking primarily works by masking sick people, and the game theory folly that creates.
It's ok to reassess when you learn new information.
> On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump officially announced the public-private partnership. The purpose of Operation Warp Speed was to coordinate Health and Human Services-wide efforts, including the NIH ACTIV partnership for vaccine and therapeutic development, the NIH RADx initiative for diagnostic development, and work by BARDA.
For what it’s worth…I am not a Trump supporter…but I am not going to make excuses for Biden and the democrats for the clusterfuck they created.
RFK made a career out of being anti-vax, while according to his congressional testimony, his own children were indeed vaccinated.
These people are political grifters, with no limits, even when it comes to other people's health.
(This comment exchange probably sucks, sorry)
That is the real issue. RFKjr is in the position he is as a reaction to bad leadership. Whatever further damage that he manages to do, is still owned by the mismanagement caused by the prior administration.
This seems like nonsense. Is your theory that the previous administration is perceived by some as having over-reached on COVID-19 vaccines; so the proper response is to install someone with no background in biomedical sciences to blow up vaccine research and implementation and then blame it all on the prior administration … do I have it right?
RFKjr’s popularity rose and he tried to capitalize on it by choosing to run for president as a democrat, then an independent, then throws his support behind Trump…who wins. Trump is a master troll who wants to hurt the opposition and who better to do that as Director of HHS than RFKjr?
Without Biden and Fauci creating the environment of people questioning vaccine efficacy, RFKjr doesn’t get the popularity bump. His position is is due to that bump. He is a reaction to bad leadership.
You keep saying this... what was the lie?
Pointing out that other vaccines have these exact same properties just leads to them claiming all of those are not really vaccines and we need to stop recommending them. In their mind if its not a shot you get once, after which there is no possibility of contracting the disease, it is a hoax.
You can see exactly this train of thought in this thread from some people
It's like all of these "conservatives" (how they think of themselves, they obviously are no longer actually conservatives) finally had their "trust the system" broken, but then rather being generally skeptical and trying to think for themselves, their general desire to trust authority figures made them latch on to contrarian "authorities". And it turns out those professional contrarians don't actually like our country very much at all.
On this topic whataboutism might apply to Trump platforming RFKjr, but that is still a reaction to my underlying premise.
The absolute clusterfuck by Fauci when he lied about masks, lied about vaccine efficacy, and the Biden administration saying being in groups was dangerous unless it was a BLM protest, did far, far more to destroy confidence in the FDA and vaccines than RFK ever did.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbooksauthors/2025/06/09/t...
People became more anti-vax because of the large contingent pushing anti-vax conspiracies to a credulous audience.
The previous administration’s policies were a significant success. Any idea they were a failure or a mistake is wrong.
It's very simple: if you push more anti-vax talking points and conspiracies, then naturally those ideas will be more popular in the zeitgeist. And, well, the right in general has been doing just that. Two plus two, now there's a lot more anti-vax people.
Yoda: “And that is why you fail…”
Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows
- https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts.In what way? (Specifically re: screwing the pooch around vaccines, and not other parts of the covid response.)
Then, even after it was apparent that the vaccine did not have the advertised benefit, they continued to press its use including mandates for federal employees and the military, encouraged censorship of social media conversation about the vaccine and its efficacy, as well as pressed covid vaccination of healthy children (who were among the least likely in the population to either get or spread the disease).
We all can look back on this time and choose to remember what we want. I am going to remember the government mandating an ineffective vaccine and lying to me about it.
The country is pretty inarguably substantially safer with a covid-vaccinated population than without. The development of those vaccines is a hugely important event in human history.
Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.
It wasn't.
First of all, they didn't need to guess, because immunology already knew that there is a difference between immunity in the mucus membranes (which is where respiratory infection has to be fought) versus in the blood. The latter is where the immune response is generated if you get an intramuscular injection. This turns out to be have been immunology 101, as testified by e.g. immunologist Liliane Schoofs to my government. You will also note subsequent efforts put into a nasal version of the vaccine that wouldn't have this design problem. There were, in fact, lies.
Second of all, the net effect of getting "vaccinated" was that people got a green pass to go out during winter time, sit across each other in bars and restaurants, and breathe each other's air, while explicitly believing they were immune, even though they were not. The argument that this was still a net positive seems preposterous and a form of magical thinking, where the people who got the ineffective shot were still somehow better off, even though they were engaging in far riskier behaviors.
The people who didn't get the shot meanwhile were forced to stay inside unless they were recently tested. So the hypothesis that the shots reduced illness by reducing transmission is likely also false. There is ample evidence now of spike protein being produced far longer than was ever promised in some patients, and also signs of immunodeficiency, which means the shots themselves were also not an unalloyed good.
What this thread mostly shows is that "anti-vax" remains a magical word, a dividing line between the Good People Who Believe Science and the Bad People Who Dismiss it. The actual details of the vaccine science are not known, and the story many people tell in retrospect does not hold up to basic scrutiny. They are willing to admit to individual instances of error, overstatement or deception in the management of COVID, but they are rarely willing to put them all together and see how this radically changes the entire picture.
Because what it looks like is an insane lobbying effort of governments and influencers, enormous amounts of public money being spent on shots we didn't need, a huge propaganda effort to silence any dissent as "anti-vax" and "anti-science", and all this because likely it did escape from a lab, and the people responsible for developing and funding it were terrified of being held accountable, and having their field shut down as the irresponsible LARP it was. Following some of these star virologists (e.g. Marion Koopmans) online is quite hilarious, because it is very obvious none of their excuses hold up.
> a network of prospective cohorts among frontline workers, showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in real-world conditions (1,2)
Are they lying? Is 90% the damning number of ineffectiveness? Also I'm confused, why wouldn't you vaccinate everyone including healthy children? It's like the first thing I would do as a parent. The yearly flu vaccine is more of a gamble than the COVID vaccine and I still get it every year. Why do you want less protection?
I dont. I am not antivax and will not defend that position. What I am arguing here is that our government mandated and oversold (lied about) the effectiveness of the vaccine. Because of that, public attitude started shifting toward an antivax mentality.
"Because of [COVID] mandates"?
Apparently you've never heard of what a good chunk of the population believes causes autism, including Kennedy.
Apparently you haven’t read all of the robust discussion on this thread. This wasn’t a “what came first the chicken or the egg” discussion. It was a “what made eating eggs so popular” discussion.
Horseshit, and you know it. Because even you acknowledged elsewhere they said "unlikely".
Then you run around this conversation saying "they said it won't happen", and using weasel words like "basically" to justify your mischaracterization of what they said as absolute claims.
However, believe what you want to believe and split hairs on language how you want. Doesn’t change the fact that vaccine trust is down and that trust started falling after the COVID vaccine was released.
Either RFKjr all of a sudden became really good all of a sudden at convincing people of his wacky ideas or something else happened.
I can remember Trump trying to take credit for funding the vaccine efforts, and getting nothing but negativity from his crowd.
Unfortunately, it predates both presidents. It's just kept creeping upward in popularity, along with a lot of other conspiracy theories.
That's the real issue, and it's weird that so few seem to realize it. Sure, they skew Republican because stay-at-home moms tend to skew that way too. As you said though, it all predates both presidents. It was the crunchy parents before COVID, and often times still is.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK561254/table/T4/
Are you being anti-humanity and anti-science if you didn’t want to take one of those?
SMALLPOX SMALLPOX ERADICATED
Yeah, the smallpox vaccine was pulled from the market because it actually worked and eradicated smallpox.
We almost got the same for polio, but unfortunately some anti-vax nuts prevented that.
So I ask again - If someone refused to take those vaccines would they be "anti-science"?
Long story short: if you are anti-vax, you for sure are anti-science. We know a lot about vaccinations and the risks of taking them and not taking them.
You're ignoring the fact that the FDA approved them initially. They said "the risks are worth the benefits".
Then years later, after more data was collected, the FDA changed their determination and said "the risks ARE NOT worth the benefits".
So I ask you for a third time - "If I refused to take those vaccines for safety reasons when the FDA first approved them, would I be anti-science?"
It's seem's like I'd be "pro-science" since I came to the same conclusion the FDA did years later?
Both scenarios are anti-science.
No, I'm asking about vaccines that were eventually pulled from the market for safety reasons.
> Or are you magically able to predict what the FDA will say in a few years?
The FDA doesn't magically monitor safety, they work off reports by HCPs. Usually after a few years of reports, they are forced to investigate (FDA action is a lagging indicator). By the time it's pulled from the market, typically many physicians are aware of the problem and haven't been using the products for months or years.
So for the 4th time, I ask - "If I were to refuse to get one of the vaccines, based off initial safety reports, but at a point where the FDA had not yet acted, would I be anti-science?"
Your question now: "If I were to refuse to get one of the vaccines, based off initial safety reports, but at a point where the FDA had not yet acted, would I be anti-science?"
We both know those 2 questions differ. But no problem, I'll answer your last question. Do you have the right qualifications to interpret those initial results?
Funny story: I saw someone on Facebook referring to some paper that some covid vaccine doesn't work. One of the authors name looked familiar, so I looked her up on Twitter. The discussion there went like this: "Hey ..., did you know anti-vaxers are using your paper to show the X vaccine doesn't work?", reply of the author "What? It's exactly the opposite, our paper shows they were actually working better than expected!".
Goes to show the idiots that got their degree from 4 YouTube videos, had no clue how to interpret a scientific paper. That's why I ask: do you have the proper qualifications to interpret such results? And by that I mean, do experts think a person like you has the right qualifications to interpret such material?
Let’s go with a real life example from my link.
Your doctor says to you “This vaccine prevents the flu, but several cases of Bell’s palsy have been reported where you may end up with facial paralysis that may never resolve. The FDA is looking at the cases and will make a determination whether or not to pull it from the market.”
I’d say every patient is equipped to make their own decision about that.
And if they decide the answer is “no”, it’s actually a pro-science and pro-humanity decision.
People like you who act like no one should ever decline a vaccine are the anti-science ones! Youre the ones who downplay the risks of any medicine and act like the FDA never makes a mistake in approving a vaccine OR new data doesn’t come out to show it shouldn’t be on the market in the first place.
Now that wasn't that hard huh?
Your initial statement was that you didn't take the vaccine based on nothing, and only later it turned out you were right. That is not scientific, like me and the other people already said many times.
And by the way, the doctors said it was best to take the covid mRNA vaccine because it was safe. If you didn't, that's anti-science and anti-life. And today, science says it was still the best choice.
I'm going to end the conversation here.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
This is the sort of logic people use against, say, wearing a seatbelt. "My cousin's roommate's friend's hairdresser would've died in a freak accident if they'd buckled theirs!" Is that true? Perhaps! Is it a good way of making decisions? No.
You can make what, in hindsight, is the correct call for the wrong reasons. (And in these cases, it's usually "we thought the risk/reward balance was 1.05 and not 0.95" sort of things.)