{"id":7087,"date":"2019-03-14T13:04:17","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T20:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=7087"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:39:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:39:40","slug":"links-and-comments-anti-vaxxers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2019\/03\/14\/links-and-comments-anti-vaxxers\/","title":{"rendered":"Links and Comments: Anti-Vaxxers"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Sunday’s New York Times, essay by Frank Bruni: The Real Horror of the Anti-Vaxxers<\/a>, subtitled “This isn\u2019t just a public health crisis. It\u2019s a public sanity one.” (The print title was “The Anti-Vaxxers’ War on Truth”.)<\/p>\n

\nHow many studies do you have to throw at the vaccine hysterics before they quit? How much of a scientific consensus, how many unimpeachable experts and how exquisitely rational an argument must you present?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a trick question, of course. There\u2019s no magic number. There\u2019s no number, period. And that\u2019s because the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren\u2019t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They\u2019re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They\u2019re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark shadows where no data can be trusted, nothing is what it seems and those who buy the party line are pitiable sheep.<\/p>\n

And, boy, are they living at the right time, when so much information and misinformation swirl by so quickly that it\u2019s easy to confuse the two and even easier to grab hold and convince yourself of whatever it is you prefer<\/i> to believe. With Google searches, you find the ostensible proof you seek. On social media, you bask in all the affirmation you could possibly want.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a key point: <\/p>\n

\nI should also add that alternative facts had currency long before Kellyanne Conway christened them such and that junk science, nutty hypotheses and showy apostasies have been around forever. Humans aren\u2019t rationalists. We\u2019re romantics, and the world is wondrous when you believe that you belong to some brave and special tribe and have experienced enlightenment \u2014 about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, about the existence of extraterrestrials, about the 9\/11 attack on the World Trade Center, about vaccines \u2014 that all the less perceptive, more gullible conformists out there simply can\u2019t comprehend.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so they are<\/p>\n

\nBeneficiaries of wisdom that prior generations lacked, they toss it away, wasting and mocking progress itself.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Sunday’s New York Times, essay by Frank Bruni: The Real Horror of the Anti-Vaxxers, subtitled “This isn\u2019t just a public health crisis. It\u2019s a public sanity one.” (The print title was “The Anti-Vaxxers’ War on Truth”.) How many studies … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservative-resistance","category-lunacy","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7087"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7089,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7087\/revisions\/7089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}