Just the way you’ve phrased this shows you’re not prepared for actual scientific inquiry and the messiness of the real world.

Vaccines aren’t things to be “believed” in like unicorns. They are medical treatments with risk profiles and side effects and billions of dollars of profits on the line. Some of them are pretty great overall!

Your comment should be pointed at RFK Jr., who believes vaccines cause autism, among other disproved nonsense.

It hasn't been disproven, there's a lot of strong evidence linking them, the pharmaceutical industry just spends vast sums of money to attack and discredit anyone who questions vaccine effectiveness. Similar to how it attacked anyone who suggested the covid vaccines didn't prevent transmission or death, even though the evidence was clear that they didn't.

I recently heard RFK Jr. on this specific topic. His answer to handling the COVID pandemic was to initiate a worldwide forum for scientists and doctors to collaborate and find treatment (first from currently available medicines and then to vaccines as needed).

He isn't anti-vaccine. He has a problem with a specific vaccine and how it was rolled out (sometimes with limited but relevant force).

I would call that view the only reasonable view. The sheer number of people who will now forever be vaccine sceptics that would never have been before is proof of that. The Pfizer vaccine was presented as being ~95% effective. I am the only person I know personally that has not had COVID. My 100 or so acquaintances are all vaccinated with an extra dose of natural immunity. No wonder people are sceptical, even an idiot can see that it wasn't doing much of anything to stop you from getting covid.

Did it decrease severity? Hard to tell given that almost everyone was vaccinated in my area.

I normally don't comment on vaccines since it is so toxic, hearing the solution from his mouth that made sense however has made it a priority, even as a Canadian.

> He has a problem with a specific vaccine

Which one specific vaccine would that be?

Im not sure honestly and don't care.

The way things were handled created -many- new vaccine sceptics and that will have a lasting impact for many years to come.

When you tell people their concerns of a specific vaccine are invalid and then claim they are anti-vaccine, you are lying. Why would anyone paying attention then trust you?

Also, some high ranking politicians are on record stating they wouldn't take a vaccine if it was created while Trump was president. Nobody ia dismissing their entire campaign based on these statements.

Thanks for picking one point of my long post and ignoring the other points btw.

> Im not sure

Because its not true.

My understanding is that he's been anti-MMR since long before COVID and that's a big part of what most people mean when they're concerned that someone is "antivax" - at least those with a memory that goes back more than 5 minutes.

So he is against specific vaccines but not all vaccines.

Against specific vaccines opposition to which has been leading to measles outbreaks. I think counting that against him is important, and again it's usually what people have meant when they've said "antivax" before COVID.

He believes the net harm from the MMR vaccines is greater than the net harm from measles, and has provided the data to back this up.

And that belief is a concern if he is wrong. AFAIK, he is wrong, so I am concerned. AFAICT his "data" is the same fabricated "MMR causes autism" data as the other anti-vaxers. If you know of something he's been pushing that's not downstream of Wakefield (or even evidence of his meaningfully revising his opinion around the Lancet's retraction) I'll give it consideration, but there's a limit to how many times I'm interested in relitigating the same questions without meaningful new data.

If someone is claiming "concerns" about vaccines for >15 years and is regularly found lying, what else should you call them? Because he hasn't just had "a problem with a specific vaccine".

What was he found to be lying about?

> What was he found to be lying about?

Pretty much everything he’s ever said about any vaccine, but in another branch of this thread I’ve done a short list of some of his more recent lies about COVID-19 vaccines, MMR vaccines, tetanus vaccines, and flu vaccines. (Perhaps the star of that list being the lie about MMR vaccines used to discourage black people from taking COVID-19 vaccines.)

Which all also underlines that the claim that he is against “a specific vaccine” is…not accurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36017401