Disinformation and misinformation kills people

Although we all know this, it bears repeating. People acting on the basis of false beliefs sometimes get themselves or others killed. That happens in reality, not theory. The Harvard Misinformation Review writes:

Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines may have “spilled over” 

to other, unrelated vaccines along party lines in the United States

This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative. These spillover effects are perplexing because the COVID-19 vaccines were developed more rapidly than the others and (some of them) were the first to use mRNA technology on a mass scale to achieve immunization. Hence, there were reasons to isolate one’s attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines rather than generalize them. This exacerbates current vaccine communication challenges.

ESSAY SUMMARY 

• We compared political conservatives in the United States to liberals, measuring the degree to which their attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines extend to other, unrelated vaccines.

• Conservatives had far more negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines compared to liberals, but also had more negative attitudes towards the influenza, MMR, HPV, and chickenpox vaccines.

• We used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to classify participants in a pre-pandemic survey into clusters of “likely liberals” and “likely conservatives.”

• This led to tentative results suggesting that conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).

• Liberals in the United States appeared to exhibit the opposite trend, generalizing their positive attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).

US law requires vaccines to be safe and effective for a vaccine's approved medical use. Period. 

In the case of liberals, believing that all common, major vaccines are safe and effective is rational and supported by a lot of empirical evidence. In the case of conservatives, neither rationality nor evidence supports their false belief. This is an example of blind, reality-denying loyalty to toxic MAGA cult disinformation. 

That false belief gets some innocent people indefensibly killed. Period.