First an analogy. Several years ago I jumped out of a perfectly working airplane. Of course I had a parachute but it was still terrifying. The danger makes sense but there are a few things about jumping out of an airplane that didn't line up with common sense.
It was tremendously violent. Just the force of the air hitting me as stepped out was tremendously disorienting. Not even the falling just stepping out of an airplane going 100+ miles per hour. Then the falling. The falling didn't feel like falling. At 8000 feet the ground is too far away. You're falling but you have no idea how fast. And in tandem sky diving I'm strapped to some guy who's an adrenaline junky dependent on him to pull the parachute. Seemed like a nice guy but he also complained about being hungover and maybe this would be the day he made a mistake.
My point is my common sense wasn't able to predict what to expect. And in fact I didn't really enjoy the experience. I'm going to try to point to data and science that explains why things don't match our common sense. When someone says they got sick from the flu vaccine that matches our common sense. But then if you look at data and the across large numbers of people you start to see patterns that are much stronger evidence.
It's also hard for to engage with people on this topic. There is evidence that using scientific evidence to convince someone that is anti-vaccine only strengthens their beliefs:
So while I want to explain why vaccines are safe just my arguing the point may cause them to go the opposite direction. So what to do? Hopefully some of this will be worth it but really I feel like I need to write it down to get it out of my system.
