MIT Says Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t So Stupid, After All

To say we have largely bungled the national and international response to a coronavirus with an overall survivability rate of 99.26% according to CDC (99.997% if you’re below the age of 25) is axiomatic. Of course, we have – and a new study out of MIT suggests that those who are still skeptical of the state-approved pandemic response might be a lot smarter than they are being portrayed.

Lockdowns have thrown over 150 million people worldwide into extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. Suicides increased dramatically during these lockdowns, as did drug overdoses, which spiked by 38.4% in the USA. The long-term impacts of lost education for 1.2 billion children deprived of traditional learning are yet to be calculated. Over 200,000 businesses closed during COVID-19 mitigation efforts in America. Two administrations have relied on the decidedly mixed messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who never met an assertion he wouldn’t later reverse.

Given the sobering realities about American leadership throughout the pandemic, is it any wonder John Q. Public is skeptical about the sagacity of aggressively messaged COVID-19 initiatives such as masking and vaccination?

In particular, the language around vaccination - the lovechild of the romance between the media and the administration - is increasingly coercive. It includes an astonishing admission that the president and his foot soldiers are collaborating with Big Tech to suppress “misinformation” – otherwise known as free speech – about all matters COVID. The talking point that “this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is patently and demonstrably false. One need only look to the United Kingdom – which this week announced that fully 47% of new COVID infections and hospitalizations are among the vaccinated – to see this assertion for the draconian dissembling it is.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki can deliver the cynical bromide that the Biden administration is “not here to place blame or threats.” But that is bureaucratic doublespeak when the president himself insisted the next frontier is going “door to door” to “encourage vaccination and that those companies not in lockstep with the administration are “killing people.” Psaki herself knows full well that all of corporate America is in possession of the cereal box decoder device by which private industry gleans its marching orders to suppress any thoughts, ideas, or opinions that dissent from the President’s policies. And they’ve been only too happy to comply. But apparently, incentives such as free donuts, baseball tickets, tuition, and lap dances weren’t enough to move the needle – even after the White House earmarked four billion dollars to PR the public.

In lieu of failed vaccine cheerleading and free prizes, a more aggressive approach is taking hold. Fomenting resentment towards those dangerous “anti-vaxxers” who now constitute the roughly 50% of America that has steadfastly refused the troubled, experimental COVID vaccines has been wildly successful. Every day the loud drumbeat of angry reprisal against those who dare to make a personal medical choice for themselves grows apace. Even sunsetting Obama-era bureaucrats, Kathleen Sibelius and Valerie Jarret have both weighed in about the need to visit harsher coercive measures upon their addled, independent-minded fellow Americans. Even though Biden and Vice President Harris both voiced skepticism of Trump’s “warp speed vaccine” last year, they have now Fauci-ed and changed their opinions 180 degrees. The current establishment view and the conventional wisdom is that folks resisting the jab must be low-IQ dolts. But is that true?

In the midst of this desperately bigoted attempt to paint half of America with a broad brush of ignorance comes an MIT study about these inconveniently vaccine-hesitant citizens. One journalist recently asserted:

“Proponents of the vaccine are unwilling or unable to understand the thinking of vaccine skeptics — or even admit that skeptics may be thinking at all. Their attempts to answer skepticism or understand it end up poisoned by condescension, and end up reinforcing it."

The writer goes on to aver that, in contravention to the media and the administration’s “anti-vaxxer” smears, the MIT study concluded that the methods used by those who argue against the efficacy of masks and the COVID vaccines are reasoned and intelligent. This “public health skepticism” he asserts, is “highly informed, scientifically literate and sophisticated in the use of data.” The MIT study further concluded that despite labeling these Americans “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-maskers,” and accusing them of conspiracy theorizing, the truth is far more nuanced. The venerable institution asserts the overwhelming calculus among these free-thinking Americans is based on a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis.

So much for besmirching nearly half of The United States as “ignorant.” Is it time for those Americans who reflexively trust everything the media and the administration tells them to reconsider? Or at the very least to refrain from blanket judgments of their fellow Americans who have sound reasons to question the lock-step messaging to which they are relentlessly subject?

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Read more from Pennel Bird.