Here’s the punchline up front: You can’t change an antivaxer’s mind because he doesn’t understand what a vaccine is.
Many years ago, I got into one of those total-waste-of-time arguments about the validity of the theory of evolution with a coworker. We went round and round. Then, he hit me with what he thought was his coup ‘d grace:
“If evolution is real, where’s the missing link? Show me the missing link.”
My jaw dropped. I was talking to someone with sort of the same level of education as myself. (We both had bachelor’s degrees — though from very different institutions and circumstances.) I was familiar with the term “missing link,” but almost entirely from the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth. I’d never heard that term in a science class.
I knew then that there was no point to the argument I was in. What he thought evolution was, was not evolution. It was a straw man built up by the Christianists who had molded his worldview growing up. Actually, he was right. If evolution was what he thought it was, it wasn’t a valid theory.
There was no way he was going to sit still for me to fill in the gaping holes in his knowledge of the natural world. And without that re-education, he didn’t have the ability to understand evolution.
I think “If evolution is real, where’s the missing link?” is functionally about the same as “If vaccines work, why don’t they work?” It’s a Socratic question based on not knowing what the f*ck you’re talking about.
The infuriating thing is the current antivax movement is being fueled by people who know perfectly well that vaccines are safe and effective. They’re mostly vaxxed themselves.
But your friends, family and neighbors who refuse to get vaxxed have had their understanding of the subject warped. The side effects have been magnified. (I’ve personally had three shots of Moderna and my only side effect was a headache after shot 2.) Effectiveness has been minimized. But worst of all, they are being deceived about what an effective vaccine does.
The example of smallpox highlights this. Smallpox, as far as we know in 2022, has been wiped from the face of the earth save for a few laboratory samples. I think a lot of us have used that example when trying to talk someone into getting the Covid shots. But the Covid vaccines are unlikely to wipe Covid off the face of the earth. At least, not in the next year or two. It’s important to note that it took some 200 years for the small pox inoculation effort to win over the disease. But all along the way, thousands upon thousands of lives were saved.
A vaccine’s virtue is in how many lives it saves, not how many cases it prevents all together.
We tend to think casually of vaccines as a shield that the viruses bounce off. That’s not how it works. Vaccines teach our bodies how to rid ourselves of infection. If the virus never gets near you, the vaccine had nothing to do with your good health.
In the real world, we can’t live in a bubble where viruses never touch us. At least, most of us can’t.
The cartoon XKCD had a wonderful explanation of how mRNA vaccines work. The vaccine teaches your body’s immune system how to fight off the virus effectively. So, when you are almost inevitably exposed, your body knows what to do. The virus will either never get a foothold, or if it does, you’re body is going to win the battle.
So the fact that people who have been vaccinated still get Covid doesn’t mean the vaccine isn’t effective. The fact that you had a mild case and weren’t hospitalized, weren’t put on a ventilator in an induced coma and you didn’t die, means it was effective.
Vaccines are one of the greatest medical miracles of the second millennium (along with sterile procedure and antibiotics).
The mRNA vaccines are another medical miracle. That we were able to develop and mass produce an effective, safe vaccine in a few months, is Star Trek level science. (Dr. McCoy always had a cure in less than an hour.) It’s SOOOOO frustrating that we have this miracle that could end the pandemic (in combination with masking, appropriate isolation and distancing) and so many people won’t believe it and won’t get it.
So, I understand why you keep beating your head against the brick wall of your brother-in-law’s refusal to get the shot. But I don’t know whether there is actually away to break through the wall of ignorance.