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Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.
I still am amazed at how many engineers I work with came out as anti Vax during 2020-2022.
I don't think antivax requires stupidity. Some people just don't trust the health system, and often for good reason. Black people, for example, have faced some horrible things due to the government, in the name of "science".
I think there are two types of antivax. There's the distrusting kind, which I think is pretty reasonable honestly. There's a lot of history behind it. Then there's the "I've done my own research" kind, which are stupid and will buy anything someone else says if it agrees with their preconceived ideas.
I guess it depends on how you define stupidity.
Distrusting governments and distrusting vaccines are totally different things. There is vast scientific consensus that vaccines work, if you're antivax you've made a conscious decision to ignore that, which is stupid in my book. Distrusting government advice on vaccines, depending on where you are, may be totally justified.
Well, again, many groups have has the scientific establishment lie to them in order to experiment on them. I can't really blame people who have that in their cultural memory for being skeptical of the current scientific establishment too. I can't view that as stupid. For example, even if the Nazis have the scientific establishment backing them up (they did in some cases), I don't want people trusting them. I don't think that's wrong. It's often hard to impossible to separate science and the state.
I don't think that's happening today though, at least not to a large extent. I think science is a lot more open now, and there's too many people watching for the same things to happen without us knowing. There are probably some pretty fucked up small experiments happening today, but not on the scale of vaccines. However, I feel it's important to see where people are coming from, especially if you want to convince them of something. If you want to convince marginalized groups to trust the concensus on vaccines, you need to understand why they'd be skeptical so you can overcome that skepticism.
There are some I have worked for that also believe the earth is 6k years old and that evolution is fake and that dinosaurs weren't real... plenty of idiots in stem fields.