I'm specifically and directly responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims, and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.

Edit, since I can't reply: parent commenter asked "What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? "and you replied "why is this question relevant" and I explained why. So I was indeed directly responding to you, despite your continued protestations to the contrary. Insisting that I wasn't being responsive to you is bordering on ridiculous.

> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.

I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.

Edit: and I'm not missing the point, I understand the role you believe it plays in the logical structure of equating democrats to republicans. I understand that you're invoking the subject of gender and saying it's an example of Democrats being estranged from scientific consensus in a way that's comparable to Republicans being estranged from scientific consensus on covid. And it's at this point in the conversation where I'm no longer attempting to engage with you, and I instead direct my comments to others reading this thread on understanding what false equivalences look like.

I was initially focused on failures to accurately compare differently weighted examples. But there's a different category of false equivalence, where people confidently invoke a completely non-existent scientific consensus. The invocation of gender falls into that category.