>It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.

But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.

"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.

I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?

Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.

I fully agree with all of this, yes. Disbelieving experts is wrong unless you are an expert or other experts also disagree, and I think that is a symptom of social media. SM, to me, is the real problem.

People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.

All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.

I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.

The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.

I think that much of the distrust is not so much caused by lack of knowledge, but ultimately by inability to accept that sometimes shit just happens. They spent an entire year frantically making up culprits to blame for a virus that quite likely just happened, like a meteor strike. Making up culprits from thin air, but decidedly. Because their minds had never been confronted with tragedy lacking a scapegoat.

There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.

We covered the necessary info to understand mRNA vaccines in my high school level biology classes.