The questions are reasonable but we have answers or strong hunches on all of those. I haven’t seen too many people get shouted down for asking them unless they are obviously JAQing off.
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But I think the whole point is that the questions the anti-anti-anti vaxxers are asking are largely those reasonable ones. And if The Establishment dismisses them as bad faith antivaxx it will hurt their credibility among the skeptical far more than it will hurt the credibility of the anti-anti-anti vaxxers.
An email from my kid’s future school:
[A]pproximately 58% of district employees have indicated that they are fully vaccinated or plan to be (source: Atlanta Public Schools survey data).
Just fucking brutal.
Maybe the other 42% just wanted to protect their HIPAA rights?
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Hurt their credibility with who? Also I see good faith “Your Covid vaccine questions answered here” stuff all over pro-vax media. There have been town halls. There seem to be a lot of avenues to get these questions answered if they are asking them in good faith up to and including their primary care physician.
I guess I agree that shouting down people with legitimate questions is bad. But I think you proposing that both a) that it is a widespread occurrence and b) somehow that is convincing people not to get vaxed due to being propagandists? Because I don’t think either of those things are really happening to a large extent.
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Scientists have backed proposals for Covid boosters in the autumn after blood tests on hundreds of people revealed that protective antibodies can wane substantially within weeks of second vaccine shots being given.
Falls in antibodies after vaccination are expected and do not necessarily mean people are more vulnerable to disease, but the researchers are concerned that if the declines persist the effectiveness of the vaccines may diminish.
The UCL Virus Watch study found that antibodies generated by two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines started to wane as early as six weeks after the second shot, in some cases falling more than 50% over 10 weeks.
Like on CNN and MSNBC, yeah I think that’s the attitude. Remember the furor at Ron Johnson when he publicly said that he wasn’t going to take the vaccine because he had recovered from covid? A reasonable stance that was treated as vaccine disinformation from what I recall.
But again, it isn’t my premise, it’s Nyhan’s and Grossman’s premise. You only get to the third level if anti-anti-vaxxers are treating the reasonable questions as verboten. If the anti-anti-anti vaxxers are all, do you really need to get vaccinated if you’ve recovered and the anti-anti vaxxers are all, that’s a good question and we don’t really know the answer, but here’s what we blah blah blah then they’re just having a conversation and there isn’t really any conflict. There’s no anti-anti vax stuff for the anti-anti-anti vaxxers to point to as being propagandistic.
It’s not the same thing at all. They think black people should have to pass drug tests to get welfare, and white people are oppressed they have to get vaxxed to do anything.
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Man, we’ve been hearing about this kind of thing for months now, there’s more to immunity than antibody levels and this is not as alarming as it sounds.
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The onus is not on anti-anti vaxxers to be perfect debating machines. They are doing the right thing for the right reasons (to save lives) even if they may not be the sharpest tools in the shed. It’s a matter of intent, someone asking a reasonable question because they are genuinely confused is of course okay.
Someone asking “reasonable questions” with the intent to obfuscate and confuse when they know the weight of the evidence is that ldo you should get vaccine is being an anti-social dickhead. If they feel it is important to ask these “reasonable questions” then they should also provide the reasonable answers that they are intelligent enough to know.
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Yeah well we’re all gonna need boosters eventually if this doesn’t go away.
Understanding this isn’t known for certain yet, do we “know” whether COVID boosters could be combined with flu shots as a once-a-year thing?
I think there are two types of people that you’re kind of lumping together
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average civilians who ask legitimate questions should, imo, be treated with a fair amount of patience and a presumption of good faith. As much as I want to yell at everyone to just get the damn shot, I can understand some people who just have a visceral skepticism around new medicines, or have a hard time making risk/reward calculations (especially if you don’t have time to really deep dive on something on only see competing headlines about Covid deaths and vaccine side effects that make it hard to determine the ratio of each of those things), etc.
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Public officials like journalists and politicians have the time, resources, and, imo, obligation to try to get answers to reasonable questions rather than just speculating into the ether about them. Like Ron Johnson could probably call up any immunologist he wanted to and have an actual conversation about whether a vaccine is necessary/beneficial to someone who already had Covid. He doesn’t have to rhetorically JAQ off in front of a bunch of reporters. And if Tucker actually wants answers to his questions he could have an actual open discussion with real experts. Instead most of his Covid coverage is either him just monologuing while musing about all the “uncertainty” or bringing on folks without medical credentials to talk about how Covid lockdowns are a tool of political control. I’m not criticizing him for asking questions. I’m mad because his approach is intentionally designed in a way that can never actually answer them even though he is in a position where another approach actually could.
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Yeah it’s the difference between asking, “What is the risk profile for teenagers?” and saying “I’m just asking what the risk profile is for teenagers. Why am I being persecuted?!?! Also immigrants bring disease.”
Don’t see why not.
I’m pessimistic so I’m thinking this becomes just like the other endemic coronaviruses that go around every year. The optimistic take is that is doesn’t evolve quickly enough and eventually everyone becomes immune enough that it goes away. So far the vaccine seem to be working against the Delta variant so that’s encouraging.
OK but average civilians can’t really ask those questions in a public way. So when Ron Johnson says he’s holding off on being vaccinated, mind-reading his intent is counterproductive even if your read is correct. Because regardless of his intentions, regular citizens who have the same questions are going to look at how Johnson’s statements are treated and react accordingly. If Johnson’s reasonable stance is treated unfairly and reflexively dismissed as anti-vax, then I think that’s polarizing and self-defeating. Same thing with Carlson. His audience likes and trusts him, so his reasonable questions should be engaged and his unreasonable questions should be attacked. Like, as in Biden public health officials should go on his program to discuss it. And if Carlson won’t have them on publicize that they’re trying to get the HHS undersecretary or whoever to answer his questions but Carlson cowardly refuses. Stuff like that. But whoever went on would have to treat his reasonable questions seriously or Carlson would wreck them.
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People don’t make decisions like this. Telling a us senator to fuck off isn’t going to result in bob, who already made their decision about vaccines, to appreciably change their position. Shutting Johnson up decreases disinformation, which has a positive affect.
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I’m not mind reading intent, I’m watching their actions. Again, most of his Covid coverage isn’t even having on guests, it’s rhetorical monolging where no attempt is even being made to answer the questions he is posing. That’s on him. And when he does have guests, Tucker generally isn’t booking HHS officials, or the heads of immunology at children’s hospitals, or public health officials from Covid hotspots. Do you really think it’s because he’s asking and ALL of those folks are just refusing to come on and chat with him? At some point you have to recognize that his ignorance is both intentional and performative and stop putting the onus on other folks to beg to come on his show so that they can be props for his act.
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None of the questions are legit. Maybe at one point they could have been, but now they are all just pure anti-vax. To think otherwise is just fucking stupid.
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Even if it doesn’t have a positive affect, it is roughly neutral. The problem is people like Tucker Carlson willingly killing his own viewers and 100% of the blame should go towards him. Quite a fucked up country were we just accept evil sociopathy as part of the landscape and then move onto casting aspersions upon those who arguably don’t respond to that evil perfectly.
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