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.
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."
Not only is it misused, the doctrine Holmes established was walked back (by Holmes himself!) and hasn't been the standard since 1969.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
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.
The analogy simply does not hold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Kids living with their grandparents should definitely get vaccinated.
Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies.
If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
Conjecture is as conjecture does
You didn't see it so it must not exist?
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
That doesn't work. It didn't work for climate change and it won't work for vaccines.
BTW, ever heard of Duane Gish?
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
There are roughly 53,300,000 people aged 18-29 and ~3400 deaths (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...), which works out to 1 in 16,000. Of course, you say, that's assuming all 18-29 year-olds have had COVID, which is wrong. There's only been 7,400,000 cases among that age group (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254271/us-total-number-...), giving a 1 in 2200 risk.
Which has the amusing paragraph:
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
As someone with a pre-existing heart condition I'd like to read that research. Do you have any links?
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
>At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand vaccine skeptics.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
Problem: TOTALITARIANISM!
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
TOTALITARIANISM!!!
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.
There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."