alt Hacker NewsDismissing 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.
Replies
The problem with this argument is that there are an infinite amount of "crackpot" views that then need to be "acknowledged" and engaged with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Dismissing people who dismiss the antivax movement like this is part of what fuels the anti-anti-vax movement.