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carrots's avatar

The most success I've had in discussion is with people who just assume I've been vaccinated because I'm a scientist and seem reasonably rational. (I don't fit their preconceived notion of a raging Trump-supporting hillbilly antivaxxer, I guess.)

I generally don't disabuse them of that idea, just let it exist as their assumption. I use expansive statements like, "we who support vaccination science" and "those of us who really hoped these vaccines would be effective" or something like that, in an effort to demonstrate that I am not their enemy. I try to stay calm and objectively discuss research findings. I try not to rely on too many anecdotes, but sometimes data is too abstract for people and you have to bring up the person you know who had a breakthrough and spread it around their office because they didn't run a fever. But in the end, I find that if I just try to make it about "us"as humans, I get a lot more buy in from the very invested vaccinated.

That being said, however, I did have a nice calm conversation with a vaccinated friend (maybe not a friend anymore?) who agreed with me that the vaccines were largely ineffective, admitted the vaccinated can and do become infected and spread covid, and stated that mandates were an overreach-but when I finally told her I had recovered from covid as an unvaccinated individual, she literally jumped out of my car at the stoplight to get away from me.

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Mike Williams's avatar

I responded to a slightly asinine post on facebook about vaccines.I posted up a meta-analysis paper showing vaccinated and unvaccinated could pass on the virus as well as a CDC statement about masks being fairly useless...one of the "entranced" was telling the person whose page it was, to ignore me because "they" only accept published science and CDC statements...which is what I posted.Its not really possible to break the depth of the trance state of people like that..

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