Propaganda and Mandarin Class failure

The Bad Cat is at it again.  From "Vaccine hesitancy" is not a helpful term by el gato malo.

He is responding to this propaganda headline:

Click to enlarge.

The original reporting is here, and the original research is here.  The reporting is typical cut-and-paste, taking the language and messaging from the research.  

From the Abstract:

On college campuses, effective management of vaccine-preventable transmissible pathogens requires understanding student vaccination intentions. This is necessary for developing and tailoring health messaging to maximize uptake of health information and vaccines. The current study explored students’ beliefs and attitudes about vaccines in general, and the new COVID-19 vaccines specifically. This study provides insights into effective health messaging needed to rapidly increase COVID-19 vaccination on college campuses—information that will continue to be informative in future academic years across a broad scope of pathogens.  Data were collected via an online cohort survey of college students aged 18 years and older residing on or near the campus of a large public university during fall 2020. Overall, we found COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in college students correlated strongly with some concerns about vaccines in general as well as with concerns specific to COVID-19 vaccines. Taken together, these results provide further insight for message development and delivery, and can inform more effective interventions to advance critical public health outcomes on college campuses beyond the current pandemic.

Political conservativism is an almost meaningless term; at the very least it lacks meaningful common parlance.  It could be Republican registration, it could be church attendance, it could be libertarianism, it could be Classical Liberalism.  Without accepted common meaning, it is useless other than as a signal that the researchers were not serious about their research.  As indicated by lack of pre-registration, non-random sample, on-line self-selection.  Importantly, the study was focused on stated intent rather than looking at actual vaccinations - future intent is a notoriously unreliable measure.  

The population size, about 700 was too small for the conjoins they were looking for (race, gender, age, political orientation, etc.)

El Gato Malo focuses on the propagandistic framing - "vaccine hesitancy" and he is right.  

He focuses on some of the emerging risks now being documented.  They are exceedingly low, but they are real. 

But  I think his main point needs greater emphasis.  The main vaccines are developed using a new technique (mRNA) without any wide scale application in the past.  We don't know from observable data whether there any long term consequences.  The entire vaccination program is being administered under a special dispensation, Emergency Use Authorization, reflecting the unknown risks.  

More to the point, as long as people are free to make their own decisions as they should be, the risk return is indeed probably greater for 18-34 year olds.  In that age bracket, the risk of catching Covid-19 is relatively low, serious health consequences tiny, hospitalization rare, and mortality near zero.  

If the vaccine is developed with an untested and novel approach, is being administered only due to emergency dispensations, with some tiny but possibly serious health impacts, AND you have close to zero probability of catching or suffering consequences from Covid-19, is it any wonder that students might reach at least an equivocal answer.

When you throw in the profound beclownment and demonstrated track record of either error and/or lying on the part of the so-called experts over the past 18 months (lockdown necessity, mask necessity, lethality intimations, social distancing requirements, virus origin suppression, etc.), is it any wonder that students (or anyone else) might hesitate to take the recommendations of known liars seriously?

Especially when they begin to translate their messaging into political bashing.

All you need is strong evidence that it is either 1) highly beneficial to the recipients in excess of the tiny risks; 2) or highly beneficial to the population at large in excess of the tiny individual risks; or 3) that you as the experts and the state have a strong track record of openness, evidence, honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness.

Of course the issue has nothing to do with vaccine hesitancy or conservative beliefs or anything like that.  It has everything to do with state and expert inconsistency, visible incompetence, dishonesty, bad intent (suppressing inconvenient information), and broad failures (damaging lockdowns with no affect on infection rates), etc.  The Mandarin Class has made their bed.  Instead of lying in it, they are lying about the thought processes of free citizens.