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Comment by tntn | Hacker News Reader

> something they say ends up magically being true

Lots of things that people say in opposition to vaccines is true, or at least has some basis in fact. Polio vaccines decades ago were contaminated with sv40, which does have the potential to cause tumors. (So there is "vaccines cause cancer!") There is also probably a real link between Guillain-Barre and vaccines, but there is also a link between any infection and Guillain-Barre, do with a vaccine you essne tidally keep the risk of that very rare syndrome and lose the risk of infection.

Vaccines are not risk-free, they just have such incredibly high value that the incredibly low risk is completely worth it.

> if we ban them, what are we banning them for?

"We" are not banning them. GoFundMe is.

Call it whatever you like. "Subverting public health," maybe.

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This is why the idea of labeling anyone who's not 100% on board with 100% of vaccines, 100% of the time, as "anti-vaxxers," and having corporations make a show of banning such speech on their private platforms is so strange to me. Let's assume that literally every current "anti-vaxxer" talking point is objectively incorrect... but, sometime in the future, some major manufacturer of vaccines somehow creates a public health risk, perhaps by contaminating a year's batch of vaccines with something toxic, or something. Would it be alright to speak out against that, or would anyone doing so get publicly labelled "anti-vaxxer!!" and prevented from spreading their legitimate concerns in various places?

I just can't understand why anyone would be in favor of corporations shutting down ALL dissenting speech on a particular topic on their platform. Perhaps the "anti-vaxxers" of today are 100% wrong about everything, but that doesn't mean that 100% of criticism of vaccines now and forever more is and will always be 100% invalid. Why would anyone think that?

> This is why the idea of labeling anyone who's not 100% on board with 100% of vaccines, 100% of the time, as "anti-vaxxers,"

Nobody is doing this, including GoFundMe. In fact there is quite a lot of active research into vaccines, both how to make them more effective and how to make them more safe. No one calls those people "anti-vaxxers." No one is piling into this thread to call tntn an "anti-vaxxer." Informed, rigorous consideration and investigation of vaccines is well-accepted by society and always will be.

What gets labeled as anti-vaxxer is the uninformed, or deliberately misinformed, content that is created to attract attention, for the purposes of monetizing said attention. Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, Patreon, etc. are some of the ways people make that business work.

Snake-oil salesman is an old scam: you create or feed public fear, then you sell a (fake) solution to that fear. Anti-vaxxers have adapted an advocacy model to this pursuit--they use vaccines to feed paranoia about society, then they ask for money to "continue the fight" or whatever. The entire operation is done in bad faith: a scam.

Are you saying that everyone uses the term "anti-vaxxer" as absolutely conservatively as possible and always thinks critically before labelling someone with it? This has not been my experience whatsoever, and not only with this person-label but with literally every person-label that achieves mainstream adoption.

Given my above hypothetical situation—all current "anti-vaxxer" talking points are objectively false, but at some point in the future something happens that warrants objectively legitimate criticism of vaccines—do you really think many people who have been taught that "anti-vaxxers" are 100% wrong about 100% of what they say, 100% of the time, to the point where criticism is generally silenced or forced into the fringe, wouldn't say, "ah, looks like the anti-vaxxers are at it again!" People in this very thread are literally equating "anti-vaxxers" with literal terrorists. Do you think these people will ever be open to criticizing vaccines, given that they allow themselves to think in these terms?

tntn already pointed out that there are legitimate scientific concerns about vaccines, and no one is calling the scientists who work on those concerns "anti-vaxxers."

I understand your concern, but context matters. A trained scientist conducting rigorous research is treated differently from a random person with a blog and a GoFundMe, even if the latter tries to hang their anti-vaccine hat on something the scientist says.

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