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RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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I think this level of privileging the antivaxxer rhetoric is just irresponsible - if it would help, maybe. But they are not arguing in good faith, out of good information, or any other good impulse. Similarly to the Flat Earth bullshit and most other CTs you can point at, it's about feeling superior. Moon landing and flat earth CTs are almost lethally cringe but patchouli bullshit instead of vaccines means people literally die in droves, of a solved problem.
Huh? Typo or false syllogism? You wouldn't get much of an opportunity to disagree with anything correct, they're antivaxxers. Anyway, you wouldn't deny that. You would, even more correctly, point out that the 'rona was still the worse deal if you were actually rationally worried about any outcome. This is the sort of thing I mean when I say jumping through hoops to try and make something reasonable out of a fundamentally unreasonable position. It isn't going to help, because you cannot keep it up. Sooner or later you'll reach the end of where carefully not discussing anything in the discussion can get you.
I honestly think you're misunderstanding me a bit here. I'm not advocating for privileging anti-vaxxer rhetoric or jumping through hoops to "let them have some wins". I'm trying to underscore that the first step to developing education, informational campaigns, deprogramming regimes, etc. is to understand the thought process behind becoming an anti-vaxxer. There are plenty of comments in this thread alone along the lines of "When presented a choice between a small risk of a mild fever versus getting tuberculosis, obviously the correct choice is to get the vaccine". I think that line of argumentation is counter-productive, since it
Firstly, nobody who's afraid of getting a vaccine due to the associated risks will be convinced by "The only risk is a small risk of a light fever", since that's just provably false. Secondly, the line of argumentation anchors on the risk associated with vaccines, rather than anchoring on the risk associated with not getting them. Since I think the root cause of vaccine scepticism is irrational fear of getting them, I think it's more productive to anchor counter arguments, education, information campaigns, etc. on the very real danger associated with not having vaccines. Since fear is the underlying driving force here, we should aim to make fear of the disease outweigh fear of vaccines, not by down-playing the risk of vaccines, but rather by emphasising the risk of the diseases (which many or most vaccine sceptics downplay into absurdity).
Basically, many vaccines do have a very low but non-zero probability of causing severe side effects. We humans are known to place irrationally large weight on these kind of unlikely but severe outcomes. Trying to downplay these outcomes is not likely affect peoples perception of the risk, because we're notoriously bad at this kind of risk assessment.