> Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground?

It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies.

There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best.

This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)

Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam.

Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.

>The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)

Writing research papers at a 6th grade reading level might be literally impossible.

Which is perfectly fair, and just to be clear I don't think that all research should be written with the masses in mind either. I do suspect that there are things that could be done to make the language used a bit more accessible generally though, and a lot that could be done to improve the literacy of the typical American.

I don't think it's an education thing. I know some very well educated people who are on the anti-vax wagon.

I think it's both and political and belief thing, and not a rational thing, as there are plenty of educated and discerning individuals who have weird beliefs that wouldn't pass any type of smell test.

As for the it being a political thing, I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc, back when that was a political talking point on TV and talk radio. I think they know, rationally, that those types of claims are not grounded in reality, but it makes them feel good to repeat them as if they were anyway. I believe that, for some people, it comes down their perceived political opponents liking vaccines, therefore they themselves will oppose vaccines to spite them, and the rationalizations work backwards from there.

> I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc

It's probably wrong to lump these religious/political views in with the nutjobs, but like you say, it isn't grounded in reality and that's a common thread. You can't reason with them either way, because reason had no part in their views to start with.

I don't think it's unreasonable to question the sanity of anyone who sacrifices the health of themselves or their children just to 'own the libs', but I suspect a lot of it is actually just blind trust in their party who stokes their deepest fears, repeats over and over that the other party is lying/dangerous, and tells them what they want to hear. I doubt very many are knowingly taking up opposing views out of pure spite for the other team, then coming up with excuses for it, but I guess that could be what's happening subconsciously.

You're right it's not about education, it's about stupidity.

Agree on this, there is a wide divergence among those who are a bit sceptical of vaccines. Most people have a high trust in vaccines as they should, but recent developments have made more people sceptical.

The last round of vaccination before covid was for the swine flu where one of the vaccines showed a lot more adverse effects than the others (7x) https://www.contagionlive.com/view/high-rates-of-adverse-eve... Also a lot of people became sceptical when they tried to get the children vaccinated for covid even though there were almost no adverse effects on children from the natural infection. It is possible to be sceptical of one vaccine and not all vaccines.

"Also a lot of people became sceptical when they tried to get the children vaccinated for covid even though there were almost no adverse effects on children from the natural infection."

To prevent the spread. That's why.

> To prevent the spread. That's why.

Based on what evidence?

Isn't it now generally accepted that it doesn't prevent infection or spread and that the trials didn't study either of these variables?

The person I replied to claimed people were hesitant to get the vaccine because it was promoted for children without reason. That was a lie. There was a reason, whether you believe it doesn't matter

That it would prevent spread was itself a lie. That came out of nowhere in the first few months of 2021, when up until that point we knew they hadn't tested for it.

The propaganda worked and that got memory holed hard, until some months ago when people were surprised to learn the testing didn't include infection/transmission.

So some of us knew the whole time, and the push to vaccinate children was all sorts of weird.

And its not even the only reason. roughly half the kids end up asymptomatic but the other half still end up sick. Normally it's not too bad for them, but a small number of them do end up in hospitals, in ICU, or on a ventilator. What parent wants to unnecessarily increase the risk of that for their children? Some kids even end up with long covid, and a (thankfully) very small number end up dead. In the end, vaccines for kids was a great idea and with everything we know now they continue to be recommended.

Not necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time.

Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.

You don’t have to do anything to avoid flu vaccines. I “avoid” them because you have to waste precious time and I never get sick and I don’t like the experience of getting shots.

Yeah for sure, I think this is true for a lot of people, so perhaps "avoid" is the wrong word.

I did once calculate how many flu shots you'd have to get to save one human life based on heuristics and data on estimated length of infection chains and R0 for flu. I can't quite remember, but it's something like 100-people-years per life saved. So 10 people for 10 years might save a life by not infecting someone vulnerable. Very approximate.

I mean, they're a mess of "we're gonna guess which...this year", which seems really un-amusing - why can't they produce a series of shots that cover all the variants that they have any idea might be circulating, if they're so dangerous? We have to assume it's "because they're making a calculated risk assessment, weighing the benefits against the cost".

If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant).

"I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.

And who defines what is "bad enough"?

So you don't need life vests because you never drown?

Most people don't wear life-vests on dry land. Severe flu is very, very rare in most healthy people below 60 or 70. It's simply not a real risk, compared to driving to and from work.

Winning the lottery is even rarer and still people play and think they win.

And keeping the life vest metaphor, we are not on dry land, we are on a calm sea but still on the water.

Before COVID, the largest, and growing, anti-vax base were those who thought vaccines caused autism in children. Post-COVID total vaccine "skepticism" became a shibboleth for an order of magnitude more people.

I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths.

To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.

Yes same in Canada, but unfortunately politicians here decided to make the issue of vaccinations political so now it’s a divisive topic with more of my friends now questioning even routine vaccinations (whereas before there were none who would)