[ExI] antiscience?

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 11 14:16:57 UTC 2021


There are millions of people who won't get vaccinations, Covid or
otherwise, despite recommendations from top scientists.  Are they
antiscience?

Maybe not.  I read of people saying things like "I hear horror stories....."

So while we may think of this as a bit too paranoid, they are duly
concerned that they are not being told the whole story.  This idea has
persisted in UFO stories. (the government has released a lot of that and
people are still saying they aren't being told the whole truth).

It's true that we aren't told by doctors the full extent of what can happen
to us when we take a pill or undergo some procedure.  If they did, many
more people would opt out.  Did you ever read all the possible side
effects of taking aspirin?  Horror story for sure.  Many people would quit
taking it, along with just about every drug there is.  Of course the idea
for people like us is the probability of these things happening.  We can
judge for ourselves - mostly. We know that getting a shot of penicillin is
almost totally safe. But probability has beens shown in recent years not to
be understood by most people, including physicians.  The average person has
no chance.  They avoided airplanes after 9/11 and so many more people died
in car wrecks than would have died in airplane crashes.

Now you will say that people are placing more faith in gossip than in
medical journals.  And they are - most of them can't interpret medical
journals or probability, as noted above.

Then there's this:  in a way we are asking people to take a shot to protect
others as well as themselves.  This is asking a lot of selfish human
beings, who have read that the virus is mostly no big deal - in some cases
without symptoms.  And the fatality rate is low.

While I reckon that many people are antiscience, I would not accuse the
average person of it who doesn't get the vaccines.    It's just more
complicated than that.  bill w
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