Anti-Vax Nonsense: A Pandemic of Fallacious Arguments
I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. Please “follow” me to never miss an article.
The latest issue of The Week contains a synopsis of an article that originally appeared in The Washington Post. The article’s provocative title, “Ant-vaccine nonsense is spreading”[i] says it all. It shows unfortunately that many of the same fallacious arguments that I critiqued in my book[ii] are still being bandied about. Among them is a deep distrust and outright hostility towards Science and the CDC, especially among Republicans. Indeed, while some 89 percent of Democrats trust the CDC, only 41 percent of Republicans do.
One of the central themes underlying the arguments that Anti-Vaxxers continually employ is a misplaced concept of Freedom, namely that “I’m the best judge of myself and my body.” While I strongly defend such a principle when it comes to a woman’s fundamental right to choose whether to have an Abortion or not, I strongly oppose it when it comes to protecting our Collective Public Health, and thereby our Safety and Well-Being.
As the article notes, those opposed to the Vaccines have “served up ‘a dangerous cocktail of doubt, suspicion, and fear…,’ insisting that mandates designed to fight a deadly disease violated their ‘medial freedom’.”
As I show in my book, among the worst reasons against getting Vaccinated are those which are found in Conspiracy Theories. Thus, it’s been claimed without any proof whatsoever that the Government deliberately caused the Virus so that it could then embed micro-chips in the Vaccines to track our every whereabouts. Paranoia is thus a key ingredient in the Anti-Vax movement, a topic about which I’ve written in a recent blog.
The article notes that some 200,000 American lives could have been saved if more people had taken the Vaccines. It also notes that at least three of the candidates running for the board that controls the Sarasota Memorial Hospital are Vaccine skeptics.
Arguments have always had serious consequences. In today’s world, they literally affect our very lives.
[i] Editorial, “Anti-vaccine nonsense is spreading,” The Washington Post, reprinted in The Week, August 19, 2022, P. 12.
[ii] Ian I Mitroff, The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid 19, Springer, New York, 2022.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
