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I wonder why the anti-vaccine people can't crowd-fund serious systematic studies about the phenomenon. All what I see are citations of papers about this or tha

I wonder why the anti-vaccine people can't crowd-fund serious systematic studies about the phenomenon. All what I see are citations of papers about this or that detail and then use it as "proof!". There are hundreds of millions if not even more people who are fearful of vaccines and/or don't trust the government/elites involvement in the research. All they have to do is to hire a very large number of scientists to do serious independent research.

azinman2 4y ago
Why would they? There is plenty of proof of safety, they just ignore that. They don’t actually have the ability to understand what questions to be asking, what good study design looks like, how to interpret results, what statistics matter, the background of knowledge used to interpret any results, etc. Which is fine because few do, and the best at it are already hired into the right roles. Those are the opinions one should use as a proxy, not because they’re perfect and never make a mistake, but because the ordinary person would be spectacularly worse at it. Yet they “do research” which means just let confirmation bias run wild completely ungrounded. Let’s say they funded such a study and it came back with “the mainstream” answer which isn’t what they want.. you think they’d change their mind? I had read that flat earthers have tried to do similar things, each time getting the “wrong answer,” so they explain it away incorrectly. It’s very sad because all of this “destroy institutions, destroy science, destroy XYZ” is rooted in extreme greed for one particular thing (eg less taxes for the Koch brothers) and it ends up taking all of society out with it. It’s very easy to be against something, particularly when you don’t understand it.
fwungy 4y ago
Because the vaccine makers have thousands of times more money and media power. A study is just a study. They'd fund multiple counter studies. Vaccines are a subscription model business for pharma. Every time they get a new vaccine approved it's a potential market of 8 billion people that they don't have to wait for to get sick. People argue that pharma would actually make more money not selling flu vaccines, for example, because people would have to pay for more expensive treatments that would benefit them more, but that's illogical because most flu is treated with cheap otc meds at home. Vaccines are great, but people will lose faith in them if they get the impression that pharma is motivated by greed and not for doing good for humanity.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  But it's not about who has the most number of studies. It's about having a sufficient number of diverse studies that can be used to have a reasoned conversation about the topic instead of always ending spinning in circles with generic allegations linking one or two "papers" "proving" that "everybody is wrong!!". If everybody is wrong then it shouldn't be that hard to prove it. You don't need big pharma pockets. If in principle you can't find 500M people willing to invest $10 in a crowd funding campaign it means that the vaccine skeptics are actually a minority and why are we having this conversation? With 5 billion dollars you can find enough scientists to seriously research and rigorously destroy any bullshit that big pharma is selling to us! But it's not like this research output in itself would prove the anti vax point. It's not a quantity versus quantity, my word against your word mechanism. Once we have that body of well written papers, then we can have a next level discussion about it.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  As for the follow the money argument, what about this: most no vax people I know in my european country, are avid consumers of natural remedies of various sorts (not only homeopathy) They can easily spend way more than 80eu on various natural pills. Does it mean that the anti-vax movement is actually funded by the "Big Natura" complex?

azinman2 4y ago

Why would they? There is plenty of proof of safety, they just ignore that. They don’t actually have the ability to understand what questions to be asking, what good study design looks like, how to interpret results, what statistics matter, the background of knowledge used to interpret any results, etc. Which is fine because few do, and the best at it are already hired into the right roles. Those are the opinions one should use as a proxy, not because they’re perfect and never make a mistake, but because the ordinary person would be spectacularly worse at it. Yet they “do research” which means just let confirmation bias run wild completely ungrounded. Let’s say they funded such a study and it came back with “the mainstream” answer which isn’t what they want.. you think they’d change their mind? I had read that flat earthers have tried to do similar things, each time getting the “wrong answer,” so they explain it away incorrectly. It’s very sad because all of this “destroy institutions, destroy science, destroy XYZ” is rooted in extreme greed for one particular thing (eg less taxes for the Koch brothers) and it ends up taking all of society out with it. It’s very easy to be against something, particularly when you don’t understand it.

fwungy 4y ago

Because the vaccine makers have thousands of times more money and media power. A study is just a study. They'd fund multiple counter studies. Vaccines are a subscription model business for pharma. Every time they get a new vaccine approved it's a potential market of 8 billion people that they don't have to wait for to get sick. People argue that pharma would actually make more money not selling flu vaccines, for example, because people would have to pay for more expensive treatments that would benefit them more, but that's illogical because most flu is treated with cheap otc meds at home. Vaccines are great, but people will lose faith in them if they get the impression that pharma is motivated by greed and not for doing good for humanity.

ithkuil 4y ago
But it's not about who has the most number of studies. It's about having a sufficient number of diverse studies that can be used to have a reasoned conversation about the topic instead of always ending spinning in circles with generic allegations linking one or two "papers" "proving" that "everybody is wrong!!". If everybody is wrong then it shouldn't be that hard to prove it. You don't need big pharma pockets. If in principle you can't find 500M people willing to invest $10 in a crowd funding campaign it means that the vaccine skeptics are actually a minority and why are we having this conversation? With 5 billion dollars you can find enough scientists to seriously research and rigorously destroy any bullshit that big pharma is selling to us! But it's not like this research output in itself would prove the anti vax point. It's not a quantity versus quantity, my word against your word mechanism. Once we have that body of well written papers, then we can have a next level discussion about it.
ithkuil 4y ago
As for the follow the money argument, what about this: most no vax people I know in my european country, are avid consumers of natural remedies of various sorts (not only homeopathy) They can easily spend way more than 80eu on various natural pills. Does it mean that the anti-vax movement is actually funded by the "Big Natura" complex?