Saying this as nicely as possible, he looks a
lot like a batshit insane conspiracy theorist. The drawing from a super wide set of foggy and largely uncorrelated evidence, the very elaborate and highly malicious conspiracy, the persecution complex.
That being said, one of the archtypical examples of a conspiracy theorist is the UFO nut, who was recently basically proven at least 75% right to nobody really noticing as the military in the US declassified a bunch of stuff that is really hard to explain. Just being a conspiracy theorist doesn't make you wrong.
I still actively think
@*THASF* is wrong, but that's a different question.
Well, let me try and present the side I'm from, which is pro-vaccine.
1. Lots of things made of poisons or potential poisons are used in just about everything. I don't take the argument that it's directly harmful because of what it's made of particularly seriously. It's a damn tiny jab optimized to teach an immune system how to fight. I'd need a lot more evidence to believe it's actually worse than covid.
2. If it was even a lot better than covid, we'd be dealing with a pretty massive public health crisis I think would be visible because covid is really that awful. The risks for an average person getting covid are small, but the huge pile up of people who have worse reactions than usual lead to a
lot of problems. See how a poorly vaccinated area like Hong Kong is doing right now. Even assuming there's a conspiracy to cover up side effects, which I think is actually plausible, I don't think it's plausible it's worse on average than covid itself is.
3. The long term risks of covid vaccination and the unproven tech, yeah, that's an issue. My guess is that the long term risks of the jab are a lot lower than the long term risks of random crazy bat virus, see "long covid" and concerns about long term damage to lungs. My intuition about "crazy Chinese bat virus" vs "random new-fangled tech gizmo" lean towards fearing the bat virus more.
4. There might, might be an over-zealousness to getting healthy young people vaccinated, if the side effects are notably worse than is generally admitted. The problem here is that a lot of why we want vaccination isn't "individual outcome" but "group outcome." More vaccinated populations spread the virus slower, have less of a chance for it to mutate, and protect the especially vulnerable to covid a lot better than unvaccinated ones. It might be against many individual's interests to be vaccinated while still a good idea to get everyone vaccinated on average, and there's a good chance of "tragedy of the commons" being in place if the side effects aren't implausibly bad.
5. I don't think this logic is particularly impacted even if it was a bio-weapon lab leak, which I still consider really implausible. The new-fangled vacccines seem to work really well at every stage of making the virus less harmful and there's a lot of competition with more traditional types of vaccines to see what actually stops covid, and it seems older types of vaccines just don't work as well based on public health statistics. If Sputnik or Sinovax was working better I'd imagine absolutely insufferable talk about it to have gone on for like a year now, but it really doesn't seem that way. Note that China's still using lockdowns despite their usage of an old style of domestically produced vaccine which I don't think anyone's arguing has ties to the American bioweapon stuff.
6. I am
uncomfortable with forced vaccination, and admit it is being forced on people. I consider it a difficult decision because the community impacts of vaccination are so large, and think the weight of history points to this being well established as a thing states do that we just kind of forgot about due to the lack of recent epidemics. Still, coming from the perspective that vaccines are probably safe and effective my sympathy for antivaxxers is honestly pretty low in "stack up everyone based on how bad I feel for them" terms. Individual stories can get to me, but it seems like a really small injustice.
7. I think at the core this post is pointless, because people either are going to believe in the conspiracy or not, and I can't overcome the full conspiracy paradigm. But I've been
troubled over the past few days at just how hard it is to reconcile without ignoring it.