You're putting words in my mouth. I said as blind as a coinflip.
And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.
Let's dissect this:
>I think it's notable that there is substantial resistance to vaccines even among health care workers.
So here, the poster asserts that they find it notable, as in worthy of remark, that within the domain of healthcare people are opting out. The poster does not make any conjecture or assertions aside from that, the poster does not lean on any position nor support one from the authority of the "healthcare worker" mosaic. Instead, the poster very simply states that it is remarkable that that cohort chooses to remain unvaccinated without any further context.
The proceeding post moves to make assertions and stratify the cohort into classes, and implicitly posits the superior decisionmaking of the educated, arguing at what is in actuality a phantasm, as the parent did not postulate anything whatever. I suspect he projected some archetype onto the parent, hazarded induction, and argued with an appeal to authority in an attempt to make a point that needn't be asserted in the context.
I'm reluctant to leverage such language, but this is an appeal to authority. And there's tons of historical evidence that authorities failed to produce their predicted end without regard to their field, specialty, education, politics, etc... So to acede to this solely on the basis that the "intelligentsia" has is perhaps just as blind a means as a coinflip. And there is of course a plenitude of arguments about how politicized this has all become, vested interests, the bandwagon, what someone might call drinking the Kool-Aid. Not to mention at this point in history we're dealt with so much information that unless your specialization is intersecting with, let's say, molecular biology, you're not particularly well suited to make a judgement call. So all these physicians, whose practice is far removed from the infinitesimal nuances of the field may not be wholly capable of assessing the finer nuances, so they trail the authorities that dictate the policy to people ever further removed. And the whole of the field isn't unanimously pressing for vaccination either, there are fringe elements that are duly skeptical who do lay within your "physicians, medical researchers with PhDs" milieu [1]. Not to mention we need a control group, how will the vaccinated gloat if they've nobody to tell "I told you so..."? And, as an example, recently there was paper published showing indications that antibiotics can cause developmental abnormalities due to alterations within the gut-brain axis which alters gene expression. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, 93 years ago, and we're just now finding out that might carry adverse effects when deployed in the young, a practice long unquestioned [2]. That's just an example to wrap your head around. And there's a litany of legitimate philosophical questions that haven't been asked because we're so well conditioned to being dragged along by technology rather than taking the reigns ourselves, and that's where my predominate concerns lie.
And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.