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Comment by iinnPP | Hacker News Reader

Early in the pandemic there was a notion that the entire antivax movement was white, racist, right wing nut jobs.

Reality is quite different. The people not getting vaccinated are the people who have dealt with the government the most. They have a certain distrust after years over years of dealing with the government.

Meaning, the vast majority of the antivax hate ends up impacting the most vulnerable in our society.

Hate is bad. It's anti-human and a huge step back. It doesn't make anyone, anywhere, morally superior and it definitely isn't a marker for intelligence.

In fact, swallowing wholesale the narrative by people who have a vast history of lying(or no history of any truth/intelligent ideas) is the least intelligent thing one can do.

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> there was a notion

These are weasel words. The antivax movement among progressive west-coast parents in the US has been covered frequently in the national media e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/measles-outbreak.html

> The people not getting vaccinated are the people who have dealt with the government the most.

This is also not true. They're mostly people with low educational attainment who are more susceptible to misinformation, but I can see the narrative you're trying to create!

> In fact, swallowing wholesale the narrative by people who have a vast history of lying(or no history of any truth/intelligent ideas) is the least intelligent thing one can do.

Good governments generally understand this, and the most effective health policy during the pandemic was to give the mic to the scientific community.

> This is also not true. They're mostly people with low educational attainment who are more susceptible to misinformation, but I can see the narrative you're trying to create!

How is that creating a narrative? People with low education are also often people who deal with government programs a lot. Through medicare, social security, VA, police, public schooling, public housing and I can keep on going, these people are often dependent on government. And that combined with lower mental capacity really doesn't help.

> Good governments generally understand this, and the most effective health policy during the pandemic was to give the mic to the scientific community.

That's what they did in my country... And in my country, the covid anti-vaxxers are very relatable to the ones in the US. Hell, they get most their information from Q-anon.

I'm not sure why you're suggesting I am being dishonest, twice.

There are billions of webpages that presumably say just about everything possible. The link to the NYT article that was never promoted doesn't do much in this regard

There are also plenty of scientists who have different opinions. Only scientists with certain opinions are given interviews/timeslots. This applies to Fox as it does CNN.

None of that matters though.

My points were not about vaccinations, they were about hate. The why isn't really important.

A lot of the people not taking the vaxx were waiting for the science to stop changing, It never did. Stop talking down to these people.

Genuinely asking: wdym waiting for the science to stop changing? I thought science is always changing, that’s how it works.

I thought so too, and yet I can't count how many times I've heard the phrase "the science is settled" when it came to any pushback on the prevailing narrative surrounding COVID or mRNA vaccines in general.

Even just the argument to support mandates has completely changed, and yet too late for those who lost their jobs.

The self-declared vaccination prophets are quite exhausting to deal with. Especially since it doesn't hinder transmission as much as first assumed. You can argue that this is better than nothing, but I argue that many people should be ashamed of themselves for making blind demands.

> The self-declared vaccination prophets are quite exhausting to deal with.

This is no less true of the self-declared anti vaccination prophets, and their cousins the lab leakers. The one area in which "both sides" tends to be true is that there are condescending extremist never-shut-ups on every side of every issue, and even their allies often find them exhausting.

And both sides pretend the loudest idiot of the opposition is the baseline opinion of the entire group.

Reminds me of Inception. At least when I think of the overall outcome which I get to see daily.

It is, but to a lesser degree because they don't have any demands like keeping me out of the public life if I don't have the correct papers or masks or whatever. Lab leakers were censored for political purposes while the question was open. Or it still is open as far as I know. Not too relevant for me personally, but I believe it shouldn't be possible to censor such opinions and that alone warrants a closer look. Self-inflicted harm in that case. They too don't have many demands.

Categorically, do you tend to believe statements that place fewer demands on yourself?

No, but I have higher demands for evidence of their necessity if they do. Otherwise I may just leave the question open.

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