> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions.

1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low.

2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit.

There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.