It's easy to blame Trump/MAGA if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities. Not to mention the reproducibility crisis which makes "trust the science" claims as naive as their inverse.
The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
> if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities
Moderna has no opioid division.
And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids.
This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated.
But pull out a bit for a wider view: The establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
> establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
Conflating the "establishment" into a false monolith is rhetorically convenient. It's also wrong.
"Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the" [1]. (The Sacklers disproportionately donated to the GOP [2]. I see no evidence of them continuing that under MAGA.)
To the extent the people who "kill[ed] millions by 'fueling the current opioid crisis'" had a role in the vaccine debate, it's by hitching up to the anti-vaxers.
You appear to be treating "Moderna" as "the establishment", along with lawyers, teachers, and state sanctioned violence, in order to criticise all of them at the same time.
Why, then, does "the establishment" (by your conflation of these things) sue itself?
And every doctor keeping you well (with rules to prevent scam treatment), every teacher educating you (with rules to maintain standards of education), every defence lawyer keeping you from unjust prosecution (with rules requiring people to actually know the laws first), and every civil rights activist and trade union worker trying to make the rules better.
The "erosion of trust" which you think is a natural reaction is, in fact, a constructed one created by rhetoric which holds science up to unreasonable standards of reliability and then complains about how it can't get everything right.
Its absolutely true that public health authorities didn't get everything right during the pandemic. Its also absolutely true that studies have less epistemological power than people often make them out to have (which is what the replication crisis is really about). But it is a rhetorical angle that the appropriate response to either of those states of affairs is a rejection of science or trust in authority. People should understand the limits of science and put an appropriate amount of credence in it, but the idea that scientific authority should be outright rejected is a cultural movement with very little attachment to reality and one which is astroturfed and exploited, primarily by the political right, to whip up their base.
More broadly speaking, I think its wrong to blame the institutions themselves when elements of the american political system have been working tirelessly to discredit institutions and science for decades. It isn't a spontaneous, natural thing.
People have knee-jerk reaction to arguments like yours: oh so you don't trust the government, but choose to trust random facebook and youtube posts?
Unfortunately this is the exact problem. Governments think they have an infinite amount of trust to spend because "at least it's not random facebook posts."
The reason for the reaction is that the random facebook and youtube posts aren't held to the same standard as government and scientific sources.
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
Yah... It's not as if the healthcare/pharma industry have ever ran false multi-year propaganda campaigns that later turned out to be outright harmful to people.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
I would point out that the anti-vaxx campaign about vaccines causing autism is a multi-decade propaganda campaign that absolutely harms people.
However, being as that is merely a to quoque fallacy, I'm rather curious: do you have any examples of said campaigns run by the healthcare/pharma industry? And, more importantly, do you have any evidence such campaigns have anything to do with vaccines?
Note: the Purdue/Sackler campaign surrounding opiods is already well-known, but AFAICT, it has no relationship with vaccines.
Purdue is one pharmaceutical company. Given their behavior, I find no fault with anyone who'd distrust products from Purdue specifically. However, it appears Purdue doesn't produce any vaccines, so it is orthogonal to the discussion.
> You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
I'm open to the possibility of there being additional wrongdoing by Purdue or other pharmaceutical companies, perhaps even related to vaccines. However, the fact that one pharmaceutical company engaged in (admittedly pretty egregious) wrongdoing with respect to opioids does not itself prove any wrongdoing regarding vaccines made by itself or other companies. Assuming otherwise is falling victim to a syllogistic fallacy.
Answering my call for evidence of wrongdoing specific to vaccines with such a conspiratorial-minded question suggests you have no such evidence. I implore you to prove me incorrect.
I'm talking about perceived industry wide reputational damage by the public as a cause for distrust.
Who cares about fallacies?
Beliefs triumph over logic. Public perception > truth.
Further reputational damages are not unwarranted. Thalidomide is an old example. There are many more recent ones outside of opioid. You're free to look up actual court cases.
That might be an arguably plausible explanation for people to be skeptical of recently developed vaccines.
But most of the vaccines that are recommended for all preschool children in the US are not recent, long predating the opioid crisis.
The MMR vaccine became recommended in 1971, replacing separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccination become recommended in 1914, 1926, and 1938, respectively and were combined into the DTP combo vaccine in the '40s.
Polio vaccination became recommended in 1955.
There is no good reason to be skeptical of any of those or other similar ones I've left off. We've got 60-100+ years of widespread use which has generated a ton of data spanning multiple generations showing they are safe and effective.
It's also hard to trust due to alienation. Currently society has this rigid demand for conformity that is fueled by social media/internet shame culture.
We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down by downvotes, comments, etc. And these cultural viewpoints lack all nuance so you are forced to either shove yourself into the box wholly or be ridiculed. Even if you are 90% onboard with the popular viewpoint, you cannot let that questioning 10% show. The end result is a bunch of people wandering around with their secret "bad" thoughts being driven further against whatever populist issue they should be jumping into next.
Just absolute nonsense retconning. Purdue (OxyContin) was the primary company responsible for the epidemic, J&J to a much lesser extent, and then a bunch of PMBs and providers looked the other way. Purdue has nothing to do with vaccines. J&J licensed a covid vaccine from Janssen but otherwise none of those companies have anything to do with vaccines at all.
People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.