this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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xkcd

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Title text: The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.


Transcript[Cueball, White Hat and Megan walking]

Cueball: I try to meet people where they are, but I have such a hard time with anti-vaxxers.

[Zoom out; a tree to the right is visible]

Cueball: The pandemic brought with it so much confusing stuff.
Cueball: Ambiguous data, weird tradeoffs, disagreements, dilemmas, and uncertainty.

[Zoom in on Cueball]

Cueball: It just feels like a miracle that the best and most effective intervention to reduce suffering also turned out to be one of the easiest and simplest.
Cueball: That never happens!

[Cueball, White Hat and Megan sitting around the tree]

Cueball: I hate that people are working so hard to make it complicated when it's one of the few things in this world that isn't.


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[–] MyFairJulia@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As far as i know the fear of vaccines started growing because of Andrew Wakefield.

Andrew Wakefield developed a vaccine against measles, however the MMR vaccine was already on the market doing its job just fine. So how could he make sure that his vaccine was taken instead of the MMR?

He had to start lying. So he started to spread the notion that the MMR vaccine would cause autism. My memory hets fuzzy from here on but basically it was MMR vaccine causing autism because it would mess with gut bacteria and to prove that he was messing with data and his colleagues and until they realized what was happening the damage was already done. And over time the lie from Wakefield turned into the commonly known "vaccines cause autism".

Hbomberguy has a very comprehensive video about it: https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

As a small correction from the video itself: it isn't just that he wanted to sell the individual vaccines, it's that the parents of the kids that underwent tests wanted the investigation to go through to sue the MMR vaccine company. It was all a sham from the beginning.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

He never even had to serve prison time for any of this.

He did have his medical license taken away, which was basically the band minimum they could have done, but really he should have faced prosecution.