Misinformation

 There was a piece in the WSJ today titled "A false Narrative about Misinformation," by Robert Kaplan.  The takeaway is that Misinformation has had little effect on vaccination acceptance.  The article cites several polls and studies that compared the answers people gave before the pandemic to the current percent of the populace who remain unvaccinated.  The people who said they would not get a vaccination,  did not get the vaccination.  The numbers of vaccine skeptics did not increase because of  the  right wing  misinformation campaign, as one might fear.

No, these dunderheads were not influenced by any scientific facts or medical advice.  They simply saw the far-fetched lies as more evidence to support their previously-held opinions.  

No one has changed their mind, despite all the money spent by both sides to convince the other side that it was wrong.

We, the rightious, must also wonder if our own predispositions could be influencing the science and facts that we hold to be true.    

Everything we have learned about communicable disease can be summed-up in a few words: human interaction spreads the virus.  When you stop human interaction or get vaccinated  the disease cannot spread and it dies with it's last victim.    

This supports the wisdom of requiring  PROOF of vaccination before allowing anyone entry to any public place and especially all public transportation venues. 

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Post script Aug 7 2021

More corroboration of the observation that more factual information doesn't change opinions when it comes to vaccines:

https://news.yahoo.com/yougov-poll-vaccines-delta-210424125.html

"A survey of 1,552 U.S. adults, conducted from July 30 to Aug. 2, found that a full 40 percent of those who remain unvaccinated now believe that the COVID-19 vaccines, which rank among the safest ever produced, represent a bigger threat to their personal well-being than COVID-19 itself — even though more than 52,000 Americans are currently hospitalized because of the virus, nearly all of them unvaccinated, and more than 615,000 have already died from it."

Facts Are Stubborn Things

If you do an Internet search on the phrase "Facts are stubborn things" you will find that the cyberworld is full of conflicting information. You get about 60,000 hits. Within the first dozen citations, the quote is attributed to John Adams, Mark Twain, Ronald Regan, Lawrence Peters, and several unknown French guys. So much for stubborn facts, eh?

This, in a nutshell, is the problem for seekers of Truth ever since Al Gore invented the Internets. There is too much conflicting data, misinformation and outright malicious fabrication. As Lincoln observed, "It is easy to fool most of the people most of the time. "

Guys like Rush Limbaugh and John Stewart make their living maliciously distorting the words and deeds of anyone of the other side of their political ideology. They may think they are doing it for entertainment, but too many of their fans miss the humor and believe anything they hear from the lips of their guru.

We do not know who we can trust to tell the truth. The stubborn facts are buried deep in the mine and we do not have time to go in and dig them out ourselves. Google and other search engines are constantly gamed by special interests and clever marketers to make their interest-friendly results appear near the top of the list of returned hits.

Like me, most seekers-of-truth are in a hurry for enlightenment. So, we usually abandon our online research after viewing a few pages of search results. We click on the one or two that seem to agree with our preconceived notions. If the writing is intelligible, and it supports our point-of-view, we hyper-link it to verify our source. We shamelessly ignore contradictory data.

The problem remains:

“Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” Aldous Huxley. At least, I think he was the one who said it.