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.