Only Forwards
Just you wait and see
Saw a medical article posted online (paywalled so I could only read the opening) saying that we shouldn’t think about COVID as becoming like the flu. After widespread vaccination it will be like measles or whooping cough - won’t affect the vaccinated badly but the unvaccinated will see outbreaks that continue to be terrible. (And honestly for a person my age it’s extraordinary to think that anti-vaccination views and actions are keeping those awful diseases alive and preventing what could and should have been elimination.)
I used to work with a bloke who turned out to be anti vax.
Now initially he was not so forth right about it. I believe we were talking about some measles outbreak and I mocked Anti Vaxxers and the conversation turned to how his kids weren't vaccinated because when his eldest child was young she had some sort of mild reaction to one of the first vaccines. As far as I could tell they went to a hospital they gave the baby Panadol and sent them home. Not really a significant reaction. However anyone who has ever taken their baby to get vaccinated has likely experienced the uncomfortable reality that you inflict a small amount of pain on your baby for its greater health. That experience, the taking the child to get vaccinated as first time parents coupled with some sort of reaction, coupled with relatively straight forward medical treatment that was interpreted as dismissive. Well that sent the mother to seek answers and with confirmation bias in full force, she winds up believing that all vaccines are bad. They go on to have 2 further children an neither are then vaccinated due the above "research".
Now I am not disparaging of anyone's vocation. I am really not, do what you need to to work. But, and it is a big but, if you are not university educated and you are an after hours cleaner traumatised by an event in your life where emotions are already stretched I honestly don't understand how anyone in life could take your stance on immunology seriously. It had consumed her enough that her Husband, the dude I worked with, the more we spoke the clearer it became that he wasn't just playing along with the ideas from his wife, he held them too.
But the thing is (and why I responded to your post) These awful diseases stay alive because how do you fight the above story? How do you erase the trauma that is basically just contained within someone's head? Where in their life they have boiled it down to vaccination = bad things happening. I tried, or years whenever the subject came up we would discuss it and it would wind up in arguments. I had to stop talking to this guy. It was folly. I don't expect to change someone's mind on the internet. in this medium I rate everyone as basically unreasonable and have grown to know not to expect peoples opinion to change because of posts in forums. But in real life I expect people to at least listen to reason. he couldn't and had to go.
Logic cannot fight this fight. Evidence cannot fight this fight, confirmation bias is fully rooted within these people to the point that in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence (like the eradication of small pox) means nothing because a non peer reviewed article spouted by someone on the net means more.