Can we stop calling them antivaxxers, and use pro-disease instead?
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Definitely, but this gives me an idea - someone could buy Facebook ads about aircraft disaster documentaries and news about aircraft disasters, and target those to people who are searching for air travel tickets to popular tourist destinations. It’s a bad idea, but it would either force Facebook to change ad targeting rules, or reduce humanity’s CO2 footprint.
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Meanwhile, elsewhere,
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Yes, there IS a percentage efficacy where people would not get the flu shot.
But, it varies person to person, because what economists call “utility” is very subjective.
That’s what a free market does so well- crystallize the subjective values of a large number of people into one understandable market value.
Your “point of insufficient efficacy”, therefore, lies on a very standard economic curve. At that point, distributing vaccine is no longer economically viable!
But there’s a problem- the actual odds vs the perceived odds. Humans are lousy at perceiving odds.
Anecdotal accounts are highly overrated.
That’s what I’m driving at. You cannot beat someone’s anecdotal account merely by discounting it, mocking it, or claiming it is “fake”. (Especially when a few are actually true!) You have to play a different game.
That’s a good point what not what I’m driving at.
The “safe bastion” of the anti vax community is not the claims that are patently false.
It is the claims that are actually true (“Joey Whatsisname of Pigeon Dunk, Nebraska had a reaction to a vaccine and died”) but are mocked and declared false, rather than addressed.
People in arguments often address an obvious weak point, but leave the “Safe bastion” alone. But the problem is, as long as the bastion is safe, the argument is not won, because the guy on the other side is doing the exact same thing.
Not really. It’s pretty well publicized that flu shots are only effective against specific strains and may not prevent you from getting sick. It’s about mitigating risk - especially to those of us that are at higher risk of death or hospitalization from the flu.
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You can’t convince everyone. Some people believe in sky bigfoots and angel cures. It’s not important to convince 100% of people. This isn’t about winning every argument with every random human.
Most anti-vaccination arguments given are patently false. Most spokespeople make patently false arguments. Most surveys find people believing patently false things. They aren’t basing their thinking on the rare case of bad reactions, they’re making their case based on unscientific campfire stories.
The real problem is giving outsize attention to extremely, extremely marginal cases. Facebook ads and neutral newspaper stories shouldn’t give equal weight and platforms to “Joey Whatsisname” one-in-a-million stories over the millions of people who benefit from vaccines.
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Any time a sentence starts with “I’m not [noun], but” you know it’s not a conversation worth having because some serious splainin’ is about to occur.
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That, and it can reduce the symptoms if one is vaccinated and gets the flu anyway. (Maybe that’s what you meant)
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Shhhh! Yes, I can see that happening! And that Someone would be rival economic interests! Sophisticated programs could see, for example, that you searched Cancun first but you are now reading about the Bahamas, so articles would appear telling you about something bad that happened in Cancun. (Bad news in general would be self defeating, it would be tailored).
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Exacltly. And this really could be done - Facebook allows very fine-grained ad targeting:
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Sounds like complete bollocks, but you be you
I joined for a couple days. They toss you for bringing in any facts that don’t condemn vacvines.
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Last flu I had came on like some kind of hideous drug and floored me for a week. I didn’t get the shot that year. This year I did, and all I’ve had is one cold I’m convinced I got from picking my baby niece up and giving her a kiss. I ought to have known better; the time before that she gave me norovirus. Damn kid should come under Geneva Convention rules.
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