I found this video posted in a group related to personal health promotion yesterday. I felt that it gave me some insight into the mindset of an antivaxxer. I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts, but before I do I want to give a disclaimer that I am not a medical or scientific authority, just an amateur health enthusiast.
1) The first thing to notice is that the video title and information do not indicate that vaccines will be discussed. The creator refers to this as a "short educational video" at 0:07. Other than stating that the video is in response to "present discourse on vaccines" at 0:47 there is no sign yet that the objective of the video is to argue for an anti-vax position. This is a bait and switch.
2) The second thing to notice is that both the video title and the beginning of the videon assert a series of apparently prestigious credentials beginning at 0:53. He tries to pass this off as giving you background information but the implicit purpose of this is to argue from authority. Genuine authorities rarely discuss their achievements and accolades, and if they do come up it's usually because they are being introduced to an audience by an emcee.
3) At 1:34 he states that "the immune system that is taught to the MDs is literally about 100 years old" and proceeds to delineate what is sold as the "modern" view. This is complete a strawman: I can tell you- show you- that even a community college level microbiology 1 textbook has a far more detailed explanation of every piece of this concept map. He tries to sell the interferon system as some new unclassified middle-man when it's long been classified as a part of innate immunity.
4) This video, and the antivax camp in general, act as though researchers are intentionally trying to avoid figuring out whether or not vaccines cause problems. They're not. This is a strawman.
5) Antivaxxers repeatedly refer to the lack of placebo-controlled trials for vaccines. Conducting such a trial would require you to administer a fake vaccine to some humans and a real vaccine to others, and then infecting them all to see if the vaccine is more effective than placebo. Such an experiment would obviously be unethical.
6) The creator of this video has a colorful history of making dubious claims about his personal achievements. He claims, for example, to have "invented email", which was shown to be a lie.
It's easy to see how the average person could walk away from viewing this video second guessing what they believe about vaccines. Don't be duped. Some doctors might be trying to trick you, but chances are it's the ones making youtube videos and not the ones in the hospital.
Edited by morrowasted (01/09/20 10:31 PM)
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