“Half the people who aren’t vaccinated have sufficiently strong priors against doing anything new that they’re having none of it, it all sounds super suspicious to them, and you’re not going to tell them different. The alternative hypothesis, which I find less plausible, is that the political divide carries over to everything else automatically at this point, which is functionally the same but has some different implications.”
Could a significant number of people refusing both vaccines and Paxlovid be biased against Pfizer?
There’s at least some possibility that it’s less of a Pfizer bias than it is an “unnecessary medical intervention” bias (my family of origin made sure we all got our 1980s-recommended vaccines, but they also said “taking Tylenol for a headache doesn’t solve the underlying problem, drink a glass of water instead”). You may believe that Paxlovid could be helpful in some situations but you’d rather not take it unless you absolutely have to.
That said, we’ve also been exposed to two years of “this will work!” followed by does not work, does not work as promised, or reliable sources come to different conclusions about efficacy, and at this point it really doesn’t matter if you think the vaccines are full of nanobots or if you think they lead to an increased risk of myocarditis because the actual fact on the ground is that the vaccines mayreduce [spread, severity] but they do not work in the way that we were initially told they would work.
Therefore, the claim that Paxlovid “will work” is automatically suspect, whether or not it should be.
“Half the people who aren’t vaccinated have sufficiently strong priors against doing anything new that they’re having none of it, it all sounds super suspicious to them, and you’re not going to tell them different. The alternative hypothesis, which I find less plausible, is that the political divide carries over to everything else automatically at this point, which is functionally the same but has some different implications.”
Could a significant number of people refusing both vaccines and Paxlovid be biased against Pfizer?
There’s at least some possibility that it’s less of a Pfizer bias than it is an “unnecessary medical intervention” bias (my family of origin made sure we all got our 1980s-recommended vaccines, but they also said “taking Tylenol for a headache doesn’t solve the underlying problem, drink a glass of water instead”). You may believe that Paxlovid could be helpful in some situations but you’d rather not take it unless you absolutely have to.
That said, we’ve also been exposed to two years of “this will work!” followed by does not work, does not work as promised, or reliable sources come to different conclusions about efficacy, and at this point it really doesn’t matter if you think the vaccines are full of nanobots or if you think they lead to an increased risk of myocarditis because the actual fact on the ground is that the vaccines may reduce [spread, severity] but they do not work in the way that we were initially told they would work.
Therefore, the claim that Paxlovid “will work” is automatically suspect, whether or not it should be.