Vaccine skepticism: A problem fueled by ubiquitous data and rarefied understanding
I was initially baffled by vaccine skeptics. How can you question the safety of vaccines that have been administered to billions of people in hundreds of different countries? The medical professionals managed to identify a few-in-10-million side effect of lethal blood clots for some vaccines in some sub-populations -- so clearly the health risks of these vaccines are monitored very closely!
But I think I figured out the problem that leads to comments such as the one by SimonHayterUK: People have access to lots of data online and start interpreting it without the skills and efforts required to actually understand it. Scientists will scour data from VAERS or Yellow Card reports to determine actual vaccine health effects and separate those from reporting artefacts and noise. That's how they can link blood clots to Astra Zeneca vaccines and young people. Laymen will scour data from VAERS and Yellow Card reports and conclude that we are all Doomed, that COVID is fake, and that pregnant women will have schizophrenic teenagers in 2035.
So we are all Doomed. Not because we will be killed by a non-liability clause, but because we don't trust the professionals who get paid to analyze the data properly and instead revert to hysterical fear-mongering.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
