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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.

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Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.

Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.

The problem with this argument is that there are an infinite amount of "crackpot" views that then need to be "acknowledged" and engaged with.

Part of it is the monkey/typewriter problem.

Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.

If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.

... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.

That is exactly my point.

It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6022a1.htm

Dismissing people who dismiss the antivax movement like this is part of what fuels the anti-anti-vax movement.

I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before!

I lost friends during covid who turned into morons like that; so much so that I started to think maybe it is a side effect of the virus. One of them recently moved to the other side of the world 'because Trump is going to nuke us' (he lived in the EU). It is fine to dismiss, ignore and berate morons; they won't change their mind and must have been always like that; just before covid everyone would've laughed in your face so you would not have said any of this out loud. Now I meet a few too many people who point at vapour trails and tell me how their gov is blocking the sun and is poisoning us to keep us dumb. Dismiss and hope they won't procreate.

I also lost friends during COVID. Some because they suddenly died of cancer in their early 30s.

"vapor trails" - well, if helps you sleep better.

It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.

You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.

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