Donald, an excellent editorial - many thanks for the effort you put into writing this. It's interesting you used "vaccine hesitancy" as the anchor for your thought piece, as that phrase is loaded with emotional baggage for me. During COVID, it was often suggested by The Experts (TM) that the main reason people were hesitant to get the (experimental and superficially tested...) mRNA vaccine was because they were afraid of needles, and therefore the recommended remedy was to mock them, shame them, bribe them and ultimately coerce them into rolling up their sleeve. That reductive and utterly incorrect thesis obviously infuriated pandemic skeptics like me even further. Apart from the blithe obliteration of the principles of bodily autonomy and informed consent, the cost/benefit and risk/reward was astronomically *against* most people getting the vaccine. Moreover, we had no choice but to become cynics (rather than skeptics), as The Experts (TM) declared that anyone without a Ph.D in Virology had no business offering an opinion or even asking questions on the matter, and that any dissenting views (even those made by people with Ph.D's in Virology...) were to be discredited by labeling them as misinformation and disinformation. Fast forward to 2025, the same people who were lecturing us to "Follow The Science!!" in 2020 are now remarkably mute (or have rushed off to retirement...) as an ever-increasing body of evidence is proving that their public health policies were completely misguided and largely politically motivated, and that the "conspiracy theorists" were essentially correct from Day One. It turns out we were the ones legitimately "following the science". In summary, yes, cynicism is a poor form of wisdom, but cynicism about the motivations of both public health officials and the medical/pharma complex is completely justified, after the wanton destruction of trust we experienced during the COVID travesty.
Donald, an excellent editorial - many thanks for the effort you put into writing this. It's interesting you used "vaccine hesitancy" as the anchor for your thought piece, as that phrase is loaded with emotional baggage for me. During COVID, it was often suggested by The Experts (TM) that the main reason people were hesitant to get the (experimental and superficially tested...) mRNA vaccine was because they were afraid of needles, and therefore the recommended remedy was to mock them, shame them, bribe them and ultimately coerce them into rolling up their sleeve. That reductive and utterly incorrect thesis obviously infuriated pandemic skeptics like me even further. Apart from the blithe obliteration of the principles of bodily autonomy and informed consent, the cost/benefit and risk/reward was astronomically *against* most people getting the vaccine. Moreover, we had no choice but to become cynics (rather than skeptics), as The Experts (TM) declared that anyone without a Ph.D in Virology had no business offering an opinion or even asking questions on the matter, and that any dissenting views (even those made by people with Ph.D's in Virology...) were to be discredited by labeling them as misinformation and disinformation. Fast forward to 2025, the same people who were lecturing us to "Follow The Science!!" in 2020 are now remarkably mute (or have rushed off to retirement...) as an ever-increasing body of evidence is proving that their public health policies were completely misguided and largely politically motivated, and that the "conspiracy theorists" were essentially correct from Day One. It turns out we were the ones legitimately "following the science". In summary, yes, cynicism is a poor form of wisdom, but cynicism about the motivations of both public health officials and the medical/pharma complex is completely justified, after the wanton destruction of trust we experienced during the COVID travesty.