Conspiracy beliefs have become a major issue and obstacle to progress. While holding conspiracy beliefs has been associated with several detrimental social, personal, and health consequences, little research has been dedicated to systematically reviewing the methods that could reduce conspiracy beliefs.
A team of researchers conducted a systematic review to identify and assess interventions that have sought to counter conspiracy beliefs. They included 25 studies (total N = 7179) and discovered that, while the majority of interventions were ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs, several interventions were particularly effective. Interventions that fostered an analytical mindset or taught critical thinking skills were found to be the most effective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs.
Approximately half of the examined interventions consisted of priming-based tasks. The majority of these interventions demonstrated a significant change in conspiracy beliefs. The effects were all either small or very small. Participants who were primed to be less susceptible to persuasion tactics showed significantly lower conspiracy beliefs when compared to controls among three experimental comparisons. These effects were shown to range from small to medium.
Interventions that primed participants to engage in analytical thinking resulted in primed participants having lower conspiracy beliefs than controls. However, the effects of these differences were small. Other priming interventions focused on manipulating participants’ sense of control. They had mixed results, either increasing or decreasing conspiracy beliefs with very small effects.
About a sixth of all interventions used inoculation methods. All successfully reduced conspiracy beliefs, relative to controls, all with either medium or large effects. Inoculations that identified the factual inaccuracies of conspiracy beliefs were found to be the most effective of all the interventions in the review. Inoculations that demonstrated the logical fallacies of conspiracy beliefs were found to be the second most effective intervention.
The authors concluded that their review found that overall, the majority of current conspiracy interventions are ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs. Despite this, we have identified several promising interventions that may be fruitful to pursue in future studies. We propose that a focus on inoculation-based and critical thinking interventions will bear more promising results for future research, though further efforts are needed to reduce participant burden and more easily implement these interventions in the real world.
The identification of the factual inaccuracies of conspiracy beliefs plus the stimulation of critical thinking are two aims I actively pursue with this blog. Thus, one might hope that I do make a small contribution to the reduction of conspiracy beliefs.
Yes, one might hope – but judging from many comments posted in the discussion sections, one could easily get a different impression.
55 Responses to How can we reduce the belief in conspiracy theories?
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Conspiracy theory;
“a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful”
If you DON’T believe that this has been happening since the beginning of time, and continues to occur in our present world, you are the one wearing the tin-foil hat.
@RG
Wrong. A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful is not a conspiracy theory, it is an actual conspiracy.
A conspiracy theory is the BELIEF- and usually an unwarranted or plain wrong belief – that such plans exist.
But thank you for your contribution; it reveals a lot about your mental processes that you don’t make a distinction between actual conspiracies and the belief in them (although of course we knew this already).
Just as “Vaccine” has been redefined to “non vaccine” (no longer produces immunity – quite the reverse), “conspiracy” has been redefined as “conspiracy theory”.
It’s double-think: a process to demoralise the people.
vaccine = a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease.
that’s a reasonable definition; nobody ever claimed that the immunity is 100%, I think.
@EE
Joe Biden did.
“Biden’s positive test comes exactly one year to the day when he assured the American public that if you were vaccinated, you wouldn’t get the virus.”
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Biden said on July 21, 2021. One year later, he did.
President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID today, the White House announced. The positive test comes several months after Biden received his second booster shot in March. This would mean Biden has had four vaccine doses and still tested positive for COVID.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-said-if-you-get-vaccinated-you-won-t-get-covid-today-he-tested-positive-for-covid/ar-AAZPKi2
so?
politicians say a lot on a long day.
you must be very daft to take that seriously and even use it for definitions.
Most of the world’s population (of the more developed nations) dutifully followed what the politicians said such as “take the vaccine to avoid transmission.”
@EE
Geesh, you can never admit that you were wrong.
You said;
“nobody ever claimed that the immunity is 100%, I think.”
I pointed out that the president of the USA claimed it was so… get it ?
@RG
Your reading skills are once again failing you. Here’s what Edzard said (emphasis mine):
These two words ‘I think’ express some level of uncertainty with regard to the preceding statement. And indeed, Edzard quite likely never knew that Biden made this erroneous claim from Biden.
I also find it
extremely hypocriticala bit silly that you try to chastise Edzard on this insignificant semantic detail while promulgating the most egregious untruths yourself as a matter of routine. I also find itextremely hypocriticala bit silly that you point to Mr Biden now for what is arguably one rather dumb gaffe, but never even once criticized his predecessor for thousands upon thousands of far worse lies, including hundreds or perhaps even thousands of lies about Covid-19 and how to deal with it.@Richard Rasker
Richard, I completely accept the “I think” disclaimer. Certainly, it’s likely that the professor is not aware of everything stated by every person around the world.
That said, Mr. Biden is considered to be the leader of the free world and his emphatic statements are expected to be held to some accountability.
Beyond that, the professors reply could easily have been to acknowledge that his own statement was in error, and the statement from Mr. Biden was grossly in error. After all, a notable person DID make the statement that nobody would be covid virus infected after vaccination.
@Old Bob
First my congratulations on what may well be a record-breaking comment: no less than 5 lies in just 2 sentences:
This is a lie. See Edzard’s comment.
This is a lie. Also see Edzard’s comment.
This is a lie. Vaccines don’t make people susceptible to disease.
This is a lie. See RG’s correction.
This is another lie. In what way do scientists and doctors demoralize people by advising them to get protected against a deadly pandemic that rages across the globe? And what is ‘demoralizing’ about warning people against lies such as yours?
You are redefining “truths” as “lies” – that is double-think.
Once we do that, all reason is lost, only emotion remains: mob rule.
redefining “truths” as “lies” – that is double-think.
Once we do that, all reason is lost
AND PRECISELY THAT HAS HAPPENED IN YOUR CASE YEARS AGO.
@Old Bob
Are you trying to run for US presidency? Then sorry, but you’re still way off.
First, your mere 10 or so blatant lies per day are not nearly enough, so the first thing to do is double that number and keep it up consistently.
Second, you really need to develop your narcissistic side. Yes, you’re making yourself look like a fool already, but the point is to make yourself look like a fool by heaping praise upon yourself and at every possible occasion, including completely inappropriate occasions.
Third, you really need to work on your authoritarian side. It is not enough to claim to be gloriously right at each and every occasion – nope, you also need to denigrate, censor and threaten those who dare to disagree with you.
And, of course, violence is also the first and preferred resort in case pesky other people are standing in the way of a minor narcissistic moment.
Also, you need to get a big following, or at least claim that you have a huge following. Just two or three people here who fail to criticize you are not a ‘huge following’.
So summarized: your lying, trolling and bullshitting are encouraging but still nowhere near enough. For all the rest you are small fry, and have a lot to learn before you can be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
Your point being?
If what you say is true, then you have nothing to fear.
Richard Rasker- if Old Bob truly believes in alternative information, counter to much of the nonsense he writes at this time, information such as EE or yourself clearly expound and many others also, then he lies and is a liar. Unfortunately much evidence illustrates the fact that these ‘conspiracy theorists’ and other irrational ‘thinkers’ truly believe their nonsense and are quite impervious to changing their view. However frustrating, it seems that they are mistaken- in error- with their views and thus not actually liars.
difficult territory!
was Hitler not a liar when he claimed that the Jews were a deadly danger to civilization?
Edzard- Hitler is a good example of the difficulty of finding an exact definition of liar when he was a true believer in the reasons for his virulent antisemitism. In our types of examples as demonstrated on your blog I think it preferable not to resort to attacks on the personality of the misinformed, by calling them liars, when it is clear they are not wilfully trying to deceive your readers. Whatever research will eventually find out about how to re-educate the misinformed I’ll wager it is not by any form of insult or ridicule to their person.
@Leonard Sugarman
Yes, you are of course correct that someone who truly believes the nonsense they promulgate is strictly speaking not a liar; likewise, someone who only copy/pastes nonsense from other sources without even understanding the subject matter is also not a liar – and I think that indeed both premises apply here quite often.
So it might be better in these cases to replace the word ‘lie’ with the far more neutral ‘untruth’.
The main problem is that fervent belief in something is almost impossible to abandon, as a belief is by definition something that is often deeply heartfelt without good evidence. Once a belief has taken hold (e.g. “Vaccines are Bad”), the believers go out of their way to collect and construct ‘evidence’ for their belief, with only one possible outcome: an even more strengthened belief. Any evidence they come across contradicting the belief is simply ignored or denied.
Another problem is that belief tends to spread, not just between people, but also internally: someone who already holds a certain not-very-rational belief is far more susceptible to other (and often increasingly extreme) beliefs. Which is also clearly visible in this blog’s comments.
However, I’d say that it is a legitimate question to ask where sincere belief ends and deliberate lying starts. At a certain point, the untruths that are promulgated are so obvious, that it is impossible that the people spreading them can deny them. One example is found in certain religious groups in the US who assert that their holy book is the literal truth, fully inerrant and free of any contradictions whatsoever – even though just a few pages in, there are already two different creation accounts that can’t possibly both be true at the same time.
It really takes a very special kind of self-delusion to be able to ignore (or accept!) such glaring untruths – and I’ve seen many examples where these people admit that there are some problems with truthfulness, but that those ‘little details’ were justified for the Bigger Good. Which means that they are liars, plain and simple.
(And yes, this kind of lie is often also perpetrated by anti-vaccine people and conspiracy believers, often by selectively quoting from research papers or omitting other hugely important details that contradict their message.)
So I think I’ll keep calling some people here liars, even though it is quite possible that they truly have such little grasp of the subject matter that they are no worse than children who believe that a red-clad bearded person with an 80″ belly girth makes it down an 8″ chimney pipe (or actually: millions upon millions of such chimney pipes, all in one night) just to give them presents.
Richard Rasker- thanks for your considered response. Just a couple of points . It is a common fault of human thinking that we are able to hold completely contradictory thoughts at once in our consciousness . I’m thinking as examples ( there are infinitely more) of scientists who believe in a deity and your examples as found in holy texts. It is your freedom to use whatever language you prefer, say in describing Old Bob as a liar but I prefer to see his ( and all those other ‘conspirators’) arguments and ideas picked to pieces and shown to be in error, by counterfactual argument not ad hominem asides.
Good grief, why can’t people at least attempt to use apt words, instead of pussyfooting around with words such as ‘untruth’.
QUOTE [my formatting for clarity]
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information presented as fact, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Disinformation is a subset of misinformation, that which is deliberately deceptive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation
END of QUOTE
When an anonymous Internet troll uses the comments on Edzard’s blog to spread disinformation (lies), whether or not this troll is being deliberately deceptive is merely about whether this troll is being an active minion (a liar) or a passive minion (a deluded fool) in the promulgation of said disinformation. Either way, this troll is simply trolling; and no amount of well-reasoned countering will reduce, let alone stop, the trolling.
@Leonard Sugarman
I basically agree with you here, but for one as yet unspoken premise: that those people are honestly misinformed, without any ulterior motives for expressing their beliefs here.
I may be less trusting than you, but from what I see, their comments are not always made in good faith:
– They have a tendency to flood a thread with endless repetitions of long-debunked arguments.
– They assert their beliefs as facts, not as something that they merely believe to be true, and over which debate may take place.
– They rarely if ever engage in any meaningful discussion about what they post here. Even where they avoid repetition, criticism is usually answered by going off on a new tangent, dumping yet another copy/pasted anti-vaccine or otherwise pseudoscientific talking point into the discussion.
– They often don’t appear to understand their own comments, further reinforcing the notion that they are trying to dominate a thread by spreading as much BS as possible, not by discussing the topic at hand.
– And last but not least: they will almost never acknowledge that they or their information could be wrong somehow.
In short, I think that these repeat offenders often behave like trolls, in that they know that what they’re doing is mostly disruptive, not constructive. Which to me justifies calling them liars on occasion – although I still use that word sparingly.
Do you really believe that calling someone anything is helpful? Good or bad: flattery or abusive?
Maybe it is better to imagine oneself in front of a jury: What would make the better representation, what would further my cause, what would injure it?
To me, in my own biased way, I prefer the old-fashioned discipline of being able to defend both sides of the argument to one’s best ability, as a way to decouple one’s personality from the thing being discussed. E.g. my opening would be: “Vaccines are preventative in the safest way by a little of the “deactivated” substance, in advance of the real-exposure…”
But my opponent (me again) would reply, in this case, something such as, “But we inoculated *during* the exposure…”
And so it would progress… and then there would be a vote by the student’s union or whatever, and then there would be a repeat with the two protagonists changing sides.
That is how it used to be.
Here is my opening for debate (anti-covid-jab):
1 That it is immoral to bribe the vaccinators with up to $250 per patient:
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/the-incentives-for-doctors-got-much?utm_source=substack
Especially as to where that money comes from (Medicaid) – so who pays Medicaid? From taxes, from the general public, those who are being “incentivised” to take the jab. The jabees are paying for their own bribery.
Now it is the turn of the opposer (pro-covid-jab)
Your turn… (E.g. “incentivising” is important because… its for your own good, and the good of others…”)
And then I might respond with:
“But force is involved by taking the money for the “incentivisation”, from the People, for their “incentivisation” etc…”
And so now the debate has moved to a central theme: the use of force that is completely separate from the issue of vaccination (good or bad) – couple that to mandating the vaccine by the State, the source of the funds (taxation), and this comes (to me), unwinnable from Medicaids point of view.
Unless you disagree?
@Richard Rasker
My bad, I stand corrected sir. I should not have attached the work “conspiracy” to the given definition.
OK, lets go back to what is actually a conspiracy, ““a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful”.
Should we doubt that this occurs often ? … no, it occurs regularly. Do conspirators attempt to hide their wrongs ? Absolutely they do. Should conspiracy theorist accept every word from conspirators ? The fact that we have a court of law tells us that “truth” needs to be challenged, and many times even in a court of law the truth is not revealed.
@RG
Most of the time your argument boils down to this: the system is not perfect, therefore there must be nefarious folks behind the curtain pulling on strings.
An imperfect world such as ours is a perfect place for conspiracy theorists like you to let their imagination run wild.
Yes ☑️
It’s all panning out brilliantly
Goodbye #French fries 🇫🇷
🇺🇲 Hello #Freedom fries 🇺🇲
Goodbye #Europe 💶🇪🇺
Hello #NATO 🇬🇧🇺🇦🇺🇲
Goodbye #Dollar 💰💲💰
Hello #Brics 🇧🇷🇷🇺🇮🇳🇨🇳🇿🇦
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom
#Ukraine
#Iran
#china
#russia
en.m.wikipedia.
This kind of discussion is meaningless. Institutions are really concerned about people not believing in the same conspiracy theories that they want them to believe in. Lets take some examples. Which conspiracy theory do you believe in?
a) Pfizer & Moderna made safe & effective vaccines that immunized the population from a serious threat to humanity and a few nutty ant-vaxxers conspired to destroy a large percent of the population’s faith in these nostrums. OR
b) The DoD & the NIH conspired with Pfizer & Moderna to rush mRNA experimental technology into production, and into everyone’s arms that does not immunize and causes serious adverse effects that are being ignored by controlled mainstream and alternative media (see the Twitter Files).
a) The CDC, FDA, WHO protected us from ineffective treatments like the various multi-drug protocols for early Covid that were recommended by a handful of crazy doctors who conspired to promote them for undetermined reasons at great risk to their reputation and livelihoods. OR
b) A handful of doctors proposed effective multidrug protocols that greatly reduced early Covid in every jurisdiction where it was tried and was documented effective in hundreds of studies (c19study.com) while CDC, FDA & WHO conspired to suppresses these protocols so that big pharma could plausibly claim their Emergency Use Authorizations and clean up multi-Billions in taxpayer subsidies (with kickbacks to CDC in the form of patent royalties).
We all have the conspiracies that we want to believe. Some have more rational basis than others. Its up to the individual to decide. It is not the role of “interventionists” to decide for us what to believe. Their time would be better spent revealing what information is being hidden by the players.
Ditto.
I take back what I said about meaningless. This study is the interventionists revealing their own conspiracy to silence critics by doing various “interventions”. Thanks for making it clear to us “interventionees” so that we now know their strategies and can make allowances.
By removing the censorship.
Little article about smart people.
https://time.com/5023383/conspiracy-theories-reasons-believe/
Humans are a screwy bunch. We will never understand our thinking.
To all
https://www.rd.com/list/conspiracy-theories-that-turned-out-to-be-true/
yes, and they laughed at Galileo!!!
we know you are well-versed in using fallacies instead of logic.
They did not so much laugh at him, as threaten him to conform. But he remained defiant with “…and yet it moves.” under his breath.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Galileo-Fallacy
It is True that the Earth goes round the Sun.
This is about Justice: no one should be censored. (it is not even about being right or wrong, it is about being given a fair hearing).
a fair hearing of an 18-carat troll?
You are giving me a fair hearing without censure – thank you.
not for long, if you are staring again to bore the pants off me with your idiocies.
@Old Bob
Wrong. There are occasions where it is not only perfectly legal but also desirable to make someone shut up. These basically involve occasions where someone’s utterances cause serious harm or damage to others, and it’s at the discretion of judges if and to what extent this is the case.
Here in the Netherlands we have for instance two conspiracy believers who have caused immense grief, pain and financial damage to the parents of a murdered girl as well as other people, by maintaining that the murderer was an unidentified foreign refugee, and not a local farmer convicted of the crime – this in spite of the fact that the farmer’s DNA was found near the victim, and that the man also confessed to the murder, mentioning details that only the murderer could have known.
These people, who are best described as incurable conspiracy fanatics, harassed the girl’s mother by incessantly and publicly accusing her of lying about her own daughter’s murder, even falsifying a letter in her name in the process, and spreading lots of other completely unfounded accusations and slanderous comments about other people involved in this case.
Both of these conspiracy believers are doing jail time now because they simply would not stop their slander, harassment and pestering of completely innocent people – and rightly so.
Also note that this is still unrelated to Edzard occasionally blocking your comments. It is his blog, where he makes the rules. If he thinks that you’re flooding a thread with too much lies and nonsense, he has every right to no longer approve such comments. This censorship serves the very laudable purpose of keeping this blog readable and attractive, preventing it from becoming your personal bullhorn for spreading anti-vaccine and conspiracy rubbish – also because at a certain point, your comments don’t add anything new, and certainly don’t present any valuable insights.
“There are occasions where it is not only perfectly legal but also desirable to make someone shut up.”
That is not in dispute e.g. the ancient law of “assault and battery” covers that (“assault” is the shouting part, “battery” is the physical part).
Likewise slander – one does that at one’s peril. I have always tried *not* to make any personal remarks here, after all, it’s common manners, (although not as much fun.)
As you say, this is EE’s blog and what he says is the law in his domain. But even EE has experienced being censored – and, “[though I might disagree with him, I will fight to the death his right to say it.]”
As the fella said, “The first amendment is first for a reason.”
Old Bob:
Wikipedia:
The claim first appeared in print in 1757, more than a century after Galileo’s second trial.
Wikipedia gives a reference to the book with the original claim, but unfortunately it’s in dead tree format, so a link to that wouldn’t help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves#History
@jim
This article is typical Time bs. It says 20% of Americans STILL believe that vaccines cause autism despite “mountains of evidence”. Terrible! Well that 20% includes the Vaccine Injury court which has paid damages to parents of autistic kids injured by vaccines. Is the court a bunch of nutty anti-vaxxers?
I have some ” insights into why so many of us believe in things that just aren’t true”. Its because the Time journalists and editors salaries are paid in large part by the pharmaceutical companies’ advertising.
pity that the pharmaceutical industry evidently failed to cure your paranoia!
I believe that the Vaccine Injury Board requires little or no evidence in order to pay out compensation – there was a vaccination and there was a subsequent diagnosis. No evidence of cause. And given that vaccination and diagnosis normally occur around the same age regardless of any possible connection we can conclude nothing from these payouts.
The decision to require little evidence was deliberately taken in order to encourage vaccine take up and to avoid the ruinous costs of the legal system.
@Socrates
‘To encourage vaccine uptake’ is putting it mildly. The big problem in the 1980’s was that greedy law firms increasingly sued vaccine manufacturers for huge sums of money on behalf of parents of children who developed some condition or other shortly after vaccination. And even though the overwhelming majority of these cases were found not to involve any actual vaccine injury, the few cases that were ruled in favour of plaintiffs often cost vaccine manufacturers dozens of millions of dollars in damages.
This became so bad that many manufacturers stopped supplying vaccines to the US market simply because the financial risks became too great – and this decision was relatively easy because making childhood vaccines wasn’t very profitable anyway.
So the vaccine court (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) was established to safeguard the availability of childhood vaccines in the US, and to avoid lengthy and costly procedures, cases are decided based on a vaccine injury table: for every vaccine, there are tables listing known and suspected side effects. If a child develops one of these conditions within a certain time frame after vaccination, it is automatically assumed that the VaccineDidIt, and compensation is paid out. So causality is in fact never proven, but simply assumed based on these tables. It is also a no-fault system: even if their claim is not honoured, claimants don’t have to pay any legal fees. They are even compensated if they choose to be represented by legal counsel.
Also note that this does not mean that vaccine makers are no longer liable for their product – they can still be sued for damages, but only if a claim was first rejected by the vaccine court.
It is interesting to look at the numbers: on average, one claim is awarded for every 1.2 million vaccines administered – and that with virtually no evidence of causality required, and no financial risks for claimants at all.
I really hope that any anti-vaccine people here take notice of this, as this once again is very good evidence that vaccines are exceedingly safe.
Type something like “fight for compensation against the CDC” (e.g. using Bing) and take your pick of the first page e.g.:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/vaccine-injury-compensation-programs-overwhelmed-as-congressional-reform-languishes-00033064
Quote
“By LAUREN GARDNER
06/01/2022 05:00 AM EDT
A pair of federal programs compensating people who suffer injuries from vaccines and pandemic treatments are now facing so many claims that thousands of people may not receive payment for their injuries any time soon.
The first program, meant for standard vaccines, such as measles and polio, has too little staff to handle the number of reported injuries, and thousands of patients are waiting years for their cases to be heard.
…”
End of quote
@Richard Rasker
Sir, did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself ?
@Old Bob
Some things worth mentioning here:
– What you’re referring to is NOT the NVICP (which to the best of my knowledge has only a small backlog of a thousand cases or so, even after Covid-19), but the CICP.
– Now some 12,000 claims filed over the course of 2 years may seem like a lot – but note that this was after administering 600 million Covid vaccine doses, or 1 claim per 50,000 vaccines administered.
– As only one in every 20 claims is found eligible for compensation(*), this means that the CICP too only awards 1 compensation per 1 million vaccine doses – basically the same rate as the NVICP, confirming the notion that Covid vaccines too are exceedingly safe.
– Yes, the large CICP backlog, even though it was fully predictable(**), is undesirable, and requests are filed for more resources to address this issue.
– On the other hand, this recent number of 6,000 claims per year will with great certainty return to the normal level of ~500 claims per year. After all, the vast majority of these claims do not involve actual vaccine injury, but were just prompted by anti-vaccine misinformation.
*: If you look at the actual claims made (first spreadsheet file), you will find a lot of utterly frivolous (not to say clueless) ones. Apparently, hundreds of people claimed monetary compensation for a sore arm after vaccination …
**: Because with any new vaccine, anti-vaccine activists will crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches after lights-out, spreading lies, misinformation and FUD, causing droves of people to attribute virtually every health problem to the new vaccine. All this upheaval normally dies down after a couple of years at the most – until the introduction of another new vaccine, that is. The biggest mistake is that this governmental organization failed to anticipate and act on this highly predictable pattern.
Anyway, I would like to thank you for what turns out to be another fine example of vaccine advocacy, showing that no, there’s no evidence that there’s anything seriously wrong with vaccines in general and Covid vaccines in particular.
What is the motivation? What would cause anyone, such as most people including myself, who have had their childhood shots and regular flu vaccines etc, suddenly become that dreaded thing called an “anti-vaxxer” or cockroach, liar etc? Better to stay quiet, surely?
@Old Bob
You tell me …
Anti-vaccine people have NEVER EVER been right – yet despite being proven wrong at every single occasion, they relentlessly keep spreading their nefarious lies and anti-vaccine misinformation. And with every new vaccine, they start all over again; they will never accept that vaccines are not just vastly safer than the disease they aim to prevent, but also that vaccines may well be the safest as well as overall most effective medical intervention ever, period.
Politeness and respect are wonderful things, but when people’s lives are at stake, it is justified to call out anti-vaccine ‘activists’ for the liars and vile scum that they are, in order to protect other people from taking their ideas seriously. Because anti-vaccine lies DO cost lives. Many thousands of Covid deaths could have been prevented in the US alone if those victims would NOT have listened to anti-vaccine misinformation. Over the past years, the news featured thousands of sad stories about people who shunned Covid vaccination and instead believed the lies that proven ineffective medicines such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would protect them just fine – after which they died from Covid, often admitting on their death bed that they were wrong after all.
So, to return to your first question: what motivates you to keep spreading false information about vaccines, even though you are contributing to killing people that way? You clearly are not sufficiently educated to come to well-informed conclusions yourself, and the majority of people that you quote don’t have a relevant education (epidemiology, virology etc) either.
So why not simply accept that those anti-vaccine sources of you are wrong – and so far have always been wrong – and stop spreading their rubbish? Why do you keep rejecting the overwhelming consensus of literally millions of very intelligent people, each of whom not only spent at least 10 years of their life studying medicine, but also took an oath to protect their patients’ lives and well-being to the very best of their abilities?
@Richard Rasker said:
“…Why do you keep rejecting the overwhelming consensus of literally millions of very intelligent people, each of whom not only spent at least 10 years of their life studying medicine, but also took an oath to protect their patients’ lives and well-being to the very best of their abilities?”
Because a consensus is not what I am willing to stake my life on, I prefer to check out the details myself first and only then I might agree or not.
Dr Paul Marik had no choice. This is his experience of Hillington Hospital in London:
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-hillington-hospital-nightmare?utm_campaign=auto_share
@Old Bob
So what you say is that you reject the insights of millions of highly educated and very smart people – people who virtually ALL agree upon the same things when it comes to medicine and vaccines – and instead believe that your ‘checking out the details myself’ leads to better knowledge, EVEN if this result completely contradicts a worldwide expert consensus?
And sorry, but contrary to what you say, you clearly don’t reach your conclusions after carefully examining facts and details. It is those scientists and doctors that I mentioned who do what you describe – and because they almost all come to the same conclusions, this makes it extremely likely that those conclusions are correct.
YOU, on the other hand, depart from a foregone conclusion, i.e. that vaccines are Bad, and THEN try to find anything to prop up this completely unwarranted belief – often by accepting ‘facts’ and ‘details’ that are lies to start with. How do I know this? Simple: because you exclusively keep coming up with links to lying anti-vaccine morons such as Pierre Kory. Please realize that very likely, this man by now has more deaths to his name than the most prolific serial killers from history – simply because lots of people who are just as dim as you believed his anti-vaccine and ivermectin lies, and then died because they rejected vaccination that would have prevented them from getting fatally ill from a Covid-19 infection.
And when you spread those anti-vaccine lies from Kory and the likes, YOU are contributing to killing people as well. Please set your arrogant stupidity aside for a moment, and think about this. What you are doing is NOT helping people (or yourself), but exactly the opposite.
It’s better not to hold such hatred, because stress is not good, as the following guy beautifully, and with much good humour demonstrates:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=why+zebras+don%27t+get+ulcers+pdf&docid=603515816479949851&mid=8C296C8233335B832C728C296C8233335B832C72&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
God bless you and all of us, each with many flaws and faults, but hopefully with a growing self-love that comes from self-knowledge because, as the fella said “know your enemy, survive every other battle, but know yourself too, survive a hundred battles.”