I don’t like calling them “skeptics,” because what they really are is super-gullible with regards to conspiracy theories.

Cannot use logic to convince someone whose argument isn’t logical in the first place

I got whichever one is most convenient to me winning the discussion about how vaccines are bad and give you 100 autisms.

You should get a refund then, im so magnetic it’s not funny.

That 99% lived in Canada and went to a different school. They were supermodels. You didn’t know them.

I usually tell people that it’s safer than birth control. 1 in 1000 women experience severe complications from birth control, and we hand that stuff out like candy.

Well, about 33%.

Something something think about how dumb the average person is.

Conspiracism is not truth-tracking. It’s rooted in an emotional response to feelings of lack of control. By saying false things and getting away with it, the conspiracist feels greater control over their life. “You can’t stop me from lying, therefore I have power.”

Hence why authoritarians love conspiracism: authoritarianism promises that if you repeat the doctrine and smash the Leader’s designated enemies (the “conspiracy”), you will regain the control that was taken from you. This also illustrates why “left” authoritarianism (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism) is really rightist: it does not actually offer freedom or equality, but rather rigid hierarchy and escalating falsehood and cruelty.

If you follow Nazism, Stalin, Hamas, Trump, or Netanyahu and smash the designated enemies who the Leader tells you have been conspiring against your nation … you do not get freedom, you just eventually become the next enemy to be smashed. Of course really your Leader has built up the enemy to threaten you: authoritarians never seek peace, because peace removes the need to fear and hate.

(None of this is new. Orwell and Sartre both described it in the 1940s.)

It’s almost like those people are happily waiting for this type of panopticonic apocalyptic event to happen just to be proven right the only time in their entire miserable lives

Let’s start the turbo-vaccine-printing-machine!

No, this is what happens in a rigidly individualistic western countries like the USA, UK, and Australia where people act like children screaming “you can’t tell me what to do!”, even when it’s just the health department asking you to stay safe.

There were no forced vaccine mandates in the USA, so I don’t really know what you’re talking about when you say that this was inevitable. Right-wingers just pretended that there was a mandate so that they could do performative resistance, but you might have noticed, there was no government-imposed punishment for refusing, just the natural consequence of drowning in your own sputum in the ICU.

Yeah, so much of it is just contrarianism. These people think that if they blindly reject everything that comes from an official source that they are substantially different than the people who blindly accept everything that comes from an official source.

Just don’t drive really fast afterwards and you’ll be fine.

WTF, I’m on my first watch of Voyager and saw that episode yesterday.

Because it’s obvious to them that it’s safe and yet, due to the idiots in the population, they still had to do a study to “prove” what they already knew.

Fact is, mRNA isn’t actually new. It’s been used as a treatment for some things for nearly two decades before COVID. The remarkable part of the COVID vaccine is the speed at which they were able to adapt the tech to the new threat and produce a viable non-sterilizing vaccine from it. That shouldn’t imply that research into a COVID vaccine has stopped, there may be a better vaccine that’s possible, and I’m sure someone is working on that and I thank them for their work. The fact is mRNA was proven to be safe more than a decade before COVID-19 was a thing.

The main issue that the public has with it is that mRNA as a treatment or vaccine is relatively unused. The diseases/disorders that have utilized mRNA for treatment aren’t the most common, and unless you were presented with mRNA treatment options if you’re in the small group of people with the diagnosis that has an mRNA treatment option, it would be entirely new; and that describes the vast majority of people.

The information about it is out there, but Facebook research says that this is “brand new experimental technology” that has unpredictable outcomes, creating FUD, which is entirely based on nothing, because it’s not unpredictable and it’s not experimental. It’s true that it hasn’t been used in this application yet (at the time), and that the COVID vaccine was the first to use the technology for that purpose, but it’s hardly new/untested/experimental in any way, shape, or form. The doctors and researchers who developed the vaccine did their due diligence, and ran test groups before releasing the vaccine to the widespread population. This was done on an accelerated timeline than what is typical, but it was still done. They followed procedure. The only thing that could be argued that was missing was a long term study to show any lasting effects over years, which they simply didn’t have time for; but all evidence from the existing use of mRNA for treatments indicates that’s also going to result in no significant issues as well.

They did everything right and some portion of the population screamed bloody murder about it, meanwhile the delivery method was tried and tested, and already proven to be safe, yet they had to do yet another study to affirm what they already knew. For anyone who is aware of what medical R&D is doing and what standards they are held to, the fact that it was safe wasn’t even in question, but because some Facebook “researchers” decided it wasn’t with no evidence, there had to be additional and unnecessary work done to “prove” something that was already known to be true.

Hence, groan.