Inside the mind of one of my very smart pro-vax friends
Here's how they think. It's 100% based on deference to authority. If you ask them for data to back up their claims, they stop responding.
I recently talked to a friend of mine at a recent social event. We’ll call him Bob. He’s super smart about most things. But when it comes to the vaccine, he’s blind to the truth.
He was bragging about how he has been vaxxed 6 times with the COVID vax and he’s perfectly healthy. He can’t wait for SB 866 in California to pass so when his kids turn 12, they can decide to get the vaccine over their mother’s objections.
Bob thinks I’m a nut case, cherry picking data. He says I used to be respected, but after turning anti-vax, people have lost all respect for me. He said I have a religious belief about the vaccine and I’m not driven by data.
What he isn’t telling anyone is that he’s been losing his vision ever since he got his first COVID vaccine. He used to have 20/20 vision, but now he wears glasses and can’t drive at night. When I brought up the data showing the connection between the shots and vision loss, he changed the topic.
I showed him two papers showing the more you vaccinate, the sicker you get (see the two papers here). I asked, “Where are the papers that show the opposite?” He ignored my request.
He gets his belief system from the mainstream media. Full stop. He reasons that if I was correct, surely Bill Gates would agree with me and admit they goofed. It’s 100% deference to authority.
Bob will not look at the data himself and he doesn’t want to discuss it. He will not engage. He thinks that if I was right, there would be more than a handful of people speaking out. So he tallies the size of the support base on each side of an issue instead of looking at the data.
I hope this is useful in helping you understand the pro-vaxxers and how they think.
The important thing is you cannot turn these people around. Arguing with them is fruitless because they don’t want to see the data. They will only come around when the people they trust change their position.
This is why we need to focus on protecting doctors who speak out.
Perhaps a state ballot initiative in California providing that doctors cannot be retaliated against when they tell the truth (including having social media accounts taken down, having their license to practice medicine revoked, etc). That would prevent things like this from ever happening again.
I get it. My ex wife refused to vax our children and I hesitantly held my objections. At the time she had me read some books about vax injuries and indeed those stories sounded legit. But I kept believing that if these things were unsafe then the CDC would correct the problem. And secretly, I felt that if I allowed myself to do proper research and it proved the ex was right, then I’d find myself on the wrong side of most of my relationships and of society. A full decade passed where I lived with this cognitive dissonance. In 2018 the ex dragged me to see “Vaxxed II” and it was basically impossible for me to deny the first hand accounts of the people in the movie. So finally I started doing independent research and quickly concluded she was right, and thanked her for protecting our kids against my “follow authority” instinct when they were born. By the time covid came around, I knew the drill and saw right through the CDC narrative from Day 1. And indeed, many of my long term relationships have been strained or lost. And that’s ok. It may take 50 years, but eventually truth will prevail.
Same goes for the childhood vaccinations. I have spent countless hours talking with young moms about the baby vaccines. I presented to them the data, the vaccine ingredients, no liability (1986 Vaccine Injury Compensation Act), the vaccine labels, etc. I'm not a physician but I'm a chemist with 29 years of experience in the pharma industry. It's almost impossible to change anyone's mind. I'm sure most people think I'm crazy, but I will not stop warning people about vaccines.
When I was in college, all students were required to take a debate course in order to graduate. In this course, we debated very controversial topics. We didn't get to chose the topic or debate partner. It was set up so one week you had to present one side of the argument and the following week you had to present the opposite side of the argument. The class voted on who won the debate. At the time, I thought it was a useless college course, but as I got older, now I understand the precious value of that course. It forced all the students to keep an open mind and research both sides of any controversial topic. All high schools and colleges should require such a course. It trained my mind to question everything. Question authority!