For years, I’ve seen anti-vaxxers demanding a vaccine debate between the well-known vaccine deniers, like Robert F Kennedy, Jr and Del Bigtree, and legitimate vaccine scientists and experts. I always laugh, and then I always recommend not participating.
The problem is that if you pay attention to any scientific topic, like climate change, evolution, and, yes, vaccines, you’d think that some science behind them was actually being debated by scientists. The unfiltered information about important scientific subjects allows the science deniers to use a false equivalency to make it appear that the minority and scientifically unsupported point of view is equivalent to the scientific consensus which is always based on huge amounts of published evidence.
From listening to the screaming and yelling, you would think that there is a great vaccine debate. Or an evolution debate. Or a climate change debate.
There aren’t any debates on any of these (and hundreds of other) scientific topics. Just because someone, like RFK Jr or Bigtree, thinks that there is some “debate,” it doesn’t mean there actually is one. All that happens is one side, almost always the science deniers, use misinformation, lies, anecdotes, and pseudoscience while attempting to scream and yell as loud as possible, then claim they’ve won.
Science can’t be debated. And there is no vaccine debate.
Continue reading “The vaccine debate — there is no debate, the science is settled”