Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater.
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
I have different definitions of a crisis to be honest. And I also think the crisis of misinformation is blown out of proportion and is in the interest of some established forms of media, which make quite a good buck with clickable headlines that sell the apocalypse.
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
I don't think spreading misinformation about vaccines is in anyway comparable to the examples of hollywood or the moon landing, and I do in fact think it's a perfect fit for the analogy:
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
Every one of the people you describe had time to consider the information they got and to look for more information to confirm or contradict. Again, that is nothing like sitting in a crowded theater and hearing someone shout, "Fire!"
I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
> The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
One thing that is hard to quantify is the risk of long-term effects, which are unknown.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
> I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
> there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
Right, the risks of the disease only apply if you actually catch it, and you might get lucky and avoid it. But choosing to get vaccinated means you take on whatever the tiny tiny risk of the vaccine is to you.
> But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.