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Sunday, May 23, 2021

To The Anti-Vaccination Crowd


I've been exposed to a lot of anti-vaccination arguments and proponents over the years, and it has only kicked into high gear since this pandemic started. Then you have the vaccines themselves becoming more & more widely available to the public, and it appears that the contrarian, "rebellious" nay-sayers pour out of the woodwork to match the pace. When you consider how wrong their arguments tend to be, you get the feeling that they're being quite desperate to convince others that they're right.

Back up your anti-vaccination position with actual facts and not with the disingenuous drivel pushed by some opportunistic conspiracy-theorist hack (especially if they were, or even currently, a doctor with a career behind them). Oh and did you solidify your stance by reading materials available at the library and not on some unverified website that links to some far-right advocacy or anti-science organization? Please provide your sources in your arguments.

Contrary to my dismissal above, there are proper citations on the internet so they can be web-based, like say, Harvard Medical School showing a study of theirs that they publish on one of their websites (such as this one: Harvard Health Publishing - https://www.health.harvard.edu/) . That sort of example is fine because HMS is a routinely scrutinized and accredited institution, and they publish their own studies & reports that are usually peer-reviewed and carried out by groups of researchers & their assistants. Fact-checkers, such as Snopes, tend to work as well because they use ACTUAL CITATIONS to back up their fact-checking endeavors, citing articles based on research throughout their own works.

However, if it's some dime-a-dozen blog or editorial (mind you, what you're reading now is pretty much an editorial) where a person goes on this agenda-driven screed against getting vaccinated, and the best they can do is show videos from some anti-science dimwit(s) or other unverifiable sources then I'm afraid that just won't work. Hell, I have actually seen polemics that didn't even contain a single citation. I know such works still, somehow, manage to convince people out there who certainly don't think the way I do, but if you're going to defend a position that can lead to people getting unnecessarily infected with this virus, and even killed or debilitated as a result, then you have a lot of explaining to do. I don't think that what I demand of you when you try to defend your position to me is asking for a whole lot. If there's actual research out there that backs up your anti-vaccination argument, specifically those that we're getting right now, then share that research by all means.

In short...

If you can satisfy my expectations then you may, to some extent at least, begin to convince me. After all, I used to be in that camp years ago and stopped thinking that way when I was exposed to, you know, FACTS!

But otherwise if you really don't want a vaccine then don't get it as that is your choice to make. However, if you can't meet or exceed my expectations of you when you try to justify your stance to me, then you're absolutely wasting your time and that would be better spent elsewhere. And you'll show that I don't need to take you at all seriously. Back up your potentially dangerous (moreso than getting vaccinated, that's for sure) position with solid facts and then we'll talk, okay anti-vaxxers?