To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?

Friday, September 3, 2021

How much money and energy should governments invest into convincing their population to get vaccinated? This is a complex topic and therefore a controversial question, characterized by the presence of two opposite “camps”. I will call them the “vaxxers” and the “anti-vaxxers” to simplify things. Most of my friends classify anti-vaxxers as idiots. But that proves nothing. One of the things I believe very strongly is this: anybody who believes to know the answer to a controversial question is an idiot.

I read the news “UK government to inject all 12-15-year-olds without parental consent”, citing a Dr. Michael Yeadon who says that “to participate in this extraordinary abuse of innocent children in our care can be classified in no other way than MURDER”. I read this on lifesitenews.com, which is obviously run by an anti-vaxxer but fails to say clearly who is the owner, making my alarm bell ring.

Then I read the Wikipedia page about him, which said:

Michael Yeadon is a British pharmacologist who attracted media attention for making false or unfounded claims about the COVID-19 pandemic and the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

Oho? Since when does Wikipedia know the truth? That first sentence is not encyclopedic style. Again my alarm bell rings, this time against the vaxxer camp. I read the article on Reuters that was cited as the source of above statement. And then I changed the first sentence to this:

Michael Yeadon is a British pharmacologist who attracted media attention for making critical claims about the COVID-19 pandemic and the safety of COVID-19 vaccines that are classified false or unfounded by Britain’s Department of Health & Social Care and challenge the scientific consensus on COVID-19 by expressing controversial views.

It took less than two hours before Sangdeboeuf reverted my change, commenting “Every single article on Yeadon said his claims are false, baseless, etc.”

It is true that an overwhelming number of articles say that Yeadon is an imposter. I tried to find one article that says the opposite, and my first hit was this one, which begins “He has come forward with the truth of the vaccinations, the truth about Covid19, the truth about the new “variants” that are being pushed onto us.” And somebody who claims to tell you “the truth” is obviously not trustworthy.

It might be difficult to find trustworthy sources that belong to the anti-vaxxer camp. Diving deeper into this this would require a team of professional journalists. That’s more energy and time than I have.

P.S.: Ksenia Coffman and her tireless Maigret-like fight for truth about another topic is a beautiful example of somebody who had time and energy: One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia

P.S. (2021-09-25) Not bad: Sangdeboeuf added a whole section that explains why the words “false or unfounded” in the first paragraph are deserved.