What motivates anti-vaxxers?

Poll - Total Votes: 30

An active desire to harm people

Rank stupidity

Easily led by bad people

Other - please suggest in responses

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You can only vote on one answer.

I recently had to block a user on here for spreading harmful disinformation on Covid-19 vaccinations - they claimed that "more people are killed by the vaccine than by guns".

This claim is patently false and easily refuted by looking at the extensive scientific literature on the topic (a sample of which is available here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html).

Which got me thinking: what motivates people to spread this nonsense?

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ElwoodBlues · M

For those who claim that other diseases were mis-identified as Covid, they need to know a few facts.

Here in the table are US death numbers for the top ten causes of death for six years ending in 2020. Notice how there are 20% more deaths in 2020 than the average of the previous five years? Doing the math, that's about 500,000 excess deaths in 2020.

Notice how, in 2020, 345,000 of those 500,000 excess deaths are classified as Covid? Notice how almost all causes of death rose in 2020, including cancer & heart disease?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234

If there's any validity to the claim that lots of deaths have been mis-classified as Covid, why did almost all causes of death increase in 2020? Wouldn't mis-classification produce a reduction in those other causes? The evidence says mis-classification is a red herring.

windinhishair · 61-69, M

@ElwoodBlues Not only do the data indicate that other deaths weren't mischaracterized as covid, they indicate the covid deaths were likely undercounted.