In discussing Trump, the subject of his HHS appointee, Robert Kennedy Jr, came up. Kennedy is widely regarded as ‘antivax’ – a term regarded as pejorative by Bill Cole, although I argue that it is not inherently so. I use it to describe a person or organisation that campaigns against some or all vaccines. It’s descriptive, not pejorative. Of course, since many people have rather a low opinion of such campaigners, it becomes a pejorative. In similar fashion, “flat-earther” is both descriptive and pejorative. I would be happy to be advised of a non-pejorative synonym.
So, does RFK oppose some or all vaccines? Quite clearly, yes. So by my definition, he’s antivax. My usage here does not apply to someone who makes a personal choice not to get a particular or any vaccine. I am in favour of free choice, and someone choosing to reject a vaccine for themselves or their children is not (necessarily) opposing vaccination. The key point lies in the persuasion of others. I also would exclude people who oppose mandates. In the UK, no vaccines are mandated; it is different in the US, and there is considerable variation globally. So it is possible (though rare) for people to campaign against mandates without necessarily being ‘antivax’ as defined. The recent push by Florida Surgeon-General Joseph A. Ladapo to remove mandates is an interesting case study. It would essentially just make Florida equivalent to the UK, hardly something I should find inherently objectionable – and yet, because of Ladapo’s clear opposition to vaccination, earning a rebuke from the CDC and FDA, he isn’t the exception to the rule that mandate opponents are usually antivax. For my part, though I’m inclined to oppose mandates, I live in a country that does not have them, so it’s not a fight I can be bothered pursuing!
Supporters of RFK argue that “he’s not antivax, he just wants better studies” (as if there are those who want worse ones!). This is somewhat deceptive. Does RFK want
a) More people to be vaccinated
b) The same number to be vaccinated
c) fewer to be vaccinated.
?
Clearly, the answer is c. Kennedy’s campaigning deliberately sows mistrust of vaccines, and the guise of ‘pro-choice’ clearly contains the cryptic desire that the choice will be made in the negative. It goes beyond mere concern about specific additives: campaigning does not stop when formulations change; there’s always something else. He founded Children’s Health Defense, nominally a ‘nonprofit’ (from which Grok reports he has pocketed over $2 million). In the shop one can buy these nice baby onesies. Nothing says “not antivax” quite like parading “Unvaxxed. Unafraid” on your kid’s chest, eh? In a weirdly meta move, the same page lists adult t-shirts expressing support for the onesie – it even terms it ‘onesiegate’, as if there has been some furore.
He says his initial inspiration was from so-called ‘mercury moms’, convinced that their children’s autism was linked to mercury in vaccines. This keyed into his environmental activism; a less controversial topic. The autism-vaccine story dates back to Andrew Wakefield. Despite subsequent retraction and the striking-off of Wakefield from the medical register, this link has lodged firmly and unshakeably in the minds of activists. This hits close to home: influenced by some vegan friends (nothing wrong with veganism, but it seems to provide some correlation with ‘holistic’ approaches) my wife refused to have our 3rd child vaccinated by MMR, causing some argument. She relented, and in any case as a nurse my daughter was obliged to be up to date on all vaccines.
Extensive study has failed to find a link. But still it won’t lie. Kennedy announced that he would have an answer ‘by September’, appointing David Geier, a non-medic with no apparent grounding in evaluation of scientific studies who has long believed in the vaccine-autism link, to investigate autism. “Gosh, I wonder what he’ll find?”, the cynic in me mused. Well, apparently it’s Tylenol (Paracetamol in the UK) use in pregnancy. I haven’t seen the data, but this seems bizarre. Can we now expect a statement from CHD that they were wrong all along? I doubt it. Thimerosal (or thiomersal) stopped being used in most cases in 1999. Did autism cease or decline? It did not.
Kennedy has long campaigned against Gardasil. This is a vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus, a significant cause of cancers in girls and young women, Gardasil is nearly 100% effective in eliminating these cancers. Yet it would appear that Kennedy does not want girls to get it. The reason being the possibility of side effects. This is classically antivax, where relatively minor side effects are amplified over the devastation of the disease itself. Personally, I’d rather my girls avoided cancer. That’s just me.
Kennedy has ceased funding for mRNA vaccine technology, based upon what appears to be simply an opinion that traditional vaccines (eg inactivated whole-virus) have a better safety and efficacy profile. Yet during the evaluation of multiple platforms dusing 2020, mRNA and DNA vaccines consistently outperformed inactivated candidates. mRNA may have been over-hyped in some quarters. Many respiratory viruses tend to evolve faster than (say) measles, whose formulation has remained unchanged for years. This means that they can evade the immunity provided against the variant they were developed against. Antibodies can also wane with time. Note that this immune evasion and waning apply to infection-acquired immunity as much as vaccination: the same epitopes are involved. This is why we get colds most years, and flu.
The effectiveness of the vaccines has also declined due to a rise in the population of infection immunity. A vaccine 95% effective compared to an immune-naive population will seem much less effective when measured against a population that has had widespread infection, even if there is no viral evolution or waning of antibodies in the vaccinated. People are misinterpreting these findings to assert that mRNA vaccines are ‘useless’. They are not. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.
Additional fuel is given by lurid amplification of the safety profile. mRNA vaccines are supposed to be responsible for a mechanistically implausible array of conditions – cancers, heart disease, fertility, neural issues. Yet there is virtually no mechanism of harm that can be exploited by mRNA that does not also apply to infection. Plus, there are many avenues of harm that only infection can account for. No-one ever needed a lung transplant after vaccination, but they sure did after infection. Likewise a friend of mine had his pancreas destroyed by Covid, and became diabetic almost overnight. Amateur analyses of VAERS and Yellow Card abound. People imagine that, if something has been reported to VAERS, vaccine is definitely causal. It really isn’t that simple. You need to know background rates in the unvaccinated to make any kind of comparison. VAERS is highly reported because the vaccine is widespread, and VAERS widely publicised. We want VAERS reports. But we can do without ill-informed amateur analysis. Imagine there were an equivalent CAERS system that was as well-used to report Covid adverse effects. People are inclined to discount Covid when looking for cause, but hyper-primed to blame vaccine.
In reality, the safety profile of mRNA vaccines appears to be excellent. In the UK, we started with the AstraZeneca vaccine, a viral vector DNA vaccine (like Johnson&Johmson). The vector sends the DNA into the nucleus where it is transcribed to RNA to be translated to Spike protein in the cytoplasm. This contrasts with mRNA which is brought directly into the cytoplasm by the lipid nanoparticle (LNP). Sadly, some 50 deaths have been registered as due to this vaccine, and it has been associated with clotting issues, particularly in women. So we switched to mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna; very few deaths have since been reported. This is not to say there are no issues with mRNA. Stimulating the immune system (by vaccine or by infection) can have adverse consequences. A friend of mine suffered a debilitating fever for months. But this is not the norm. People often try and blame the LNP or the pseudouridine that is used in the RNA, but since these are absent in DNA vaccines with worse safety, it seems unlikely that these are involved.
The main issue with mRNA appears to be myo-and pericarditis in young men. From the vaccine, this occurs at a rate of about 1 in 10,000 – but from infection, the rate is about 20 times higher. Additionally, vaccine myocarditis tends more to be milder and self-resolving. Critics say the vaccine was ‘rushed’ – if we’d taken more time, we’d have found these issues. But we wouldn’t. A trial of 45,000 people (a very large trial) is insufficient to find an event less frequent than about 1 in 7,500 with 95% confidence, however long you look. This is the ”rule of 3″ with 22,500 in the treatment arm. Additionally, the longer a trial goes on, the less of a control the control group becomes. If a vaccine has any effectiveness at all, you get more infection in the control group, introducing a growing confounder.
The big advantage of mRNA is in fact its speed. You can design an antigen in a few hours, once you have the genetic sequence (again, takes a couple of hours). You can scale up to produce that RNA very quickly. Even Robert Malone, whose bitterness appears to cloud his judgement, was once an advocate of the rapid scaling of nucleic acid technology. By contrast, it takes about a year to develop an updated flu vaccine, not because people spend hours stroking their beards waiting for people in trials to die, but because it takes about 6 months to inject the new variant into chicken eggs and scale up production.
The pandemic response was a triumph; the mRNA vaccine has saved many lives – but Kennedy, with as straight a face as he can muster, told Congress that “no-one knows” if it saved any lives. This is at odds with the facts. Additionally, his vaccine-skeptic appointees Makary and Prasad have indicated that they want placebo-controlled trials before any updated formulation is marketed. This is in contrast to flu, and indeed placebo trials are considered unethical when a safe and effective treatment is already available. Who is even going to volunteer for such a trial? A vaccine skeptic wouln’t touch it with a bargepole; a pro-vaccine individual would just get the current candidate (if they can) rather than risk placebo. There are not 45,000 public-spirited individuals available any more, nor the money to pay them, nor a sufficiently widespread disease to reach endpoints quickly.
The whole Covid minimisation/vaccine skepticism movement seems to skew quite far to the Right. Trump is actually a notable exception, though God knows what he was thinking when he appointed Kennedy. But it seems as if there is a straight line from libertarian resentment of Covid measures to regarding the whole thing – including that which helped end those measures – as a bit overblown, or even a massive hoax. Many have decided that the ‘Covid hoax’ is part of a bigger hoax to persuade us that viruses are real! Beyond that, some even deny molecular biology – DNA is a hoax, and as for ribosomes…. Well, my daughter was on the front line, a doctor on Respiratory when the pandemic hit. She watched people die, “drowning in their own body fluids”. She lost a colleague to Covid, a respected and loved consultant, who caught it working on the wards. She is in no doubt that the vaccines were an absolute game-changer in keeping people out of hospital.
How can we improve the safety profile, or the efficacy, if we don’t research? How can we prepare for the next pandemic? Certainly, we cannot look to the US for leadership right now.
Next pandemic – inevitably, there will be one – we can be assured that a bunch of people will try and blind themselves to the reality; will picket hospitals, even call for people like my daughter to be hanged as part of a fantasised “Nuremberg 2.0” as being directly responsible for the deaths. That’s the arse-end of antivax, of course. It’s a spectrum. I don’t mean to tar every antivaxxer with the same brush when I use the term. But the reasoning is the same, the confirmation bias, the authority arguments, the teeth-grinding ineptness with statistics, the conspiracism, the talking points, the misunderstandings… it all gets depressingly samey after a while.
Hi Allan
Thanks for posting this. I think your position is well thought out.
My concern is that some lower cost and possibly lower risk solutions may have been put aside due to big Pharma’s influence. One simple one is vitamin d as a preventative where most of us are deficient and it puts us at many health risks especially with viruses like covid where they cause damage by up regulating inflammation pathways like NFKb.
colewd,
I think it is seductive to imagine that these things are suppressed due to Pharma influence, rather than simply because the evidence isn’t there. Vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine are the common ones, and some people display an almost religious fanaticism (I may have said this before!)..
A counterexample is dexamethasone, which is cheap, out of patent, and was widely used because it showed some efficacy.
Vitamin D supplementation is fairly (not completely) harmless, but some of the enthusiasm is based on hypothesis – for example, providing a possible explanation for why Covid was worse in dark-skinned people in temperate latitudes. Some Vitamin D measurements showed it lower in ill patients, but this could be due to lowering during sickness, rather than people getting sick because it’s low.
Either way, not a substitute for vaccine. An adjunct at best.
But, I really don’t buy the conspiratorial idea that Pharma has spent huge sums of money to get doctors and scientists to suppress cheap effective alternatives. Imagine the cost of such an enterprise, the number of people that would need to be sworn to secrecy, to willingly watch people die knowing they could be saved just for a bribe, the risk of whistleblowing on what would be a criminal enterprise.
Remember that Pharma is not a monolith, but a group of competing companies. Merck isn’t going to shell out to get Pfizer’s vaccine into arms.
I’m too old to have had the immunizations for childhood diseases.
I had every polio vax before they were released to the public. Polio was much scarier and disruptive than covid, because it paralyzed children, which is psychologically more intense than something that kills old people. I lived through polio as a kid and covid as an old person. I know how they felt subjectively.
Polio is a bit more complicated than it appears at first glance. It was endemic in India, but few, if any, kids were paralyzed. Perhaps they were exposed while breast feeding. Or perhaps the variant was just less virulent.
At any rate, the live vaccine has risks, and is not used in countries that don’t have active cases. It is not clear whether the deactivated vaccine confers lifetime immunity.
I’m going to withhold comment on the current brouhaha. Except to say I favor more transparency.
For disclosure, I will say my mother was a nurse in a polio hospital. There were lots of hospitals entirely devoted to children in iron lungs.
My best college friend died at age 40 of post polio complications.
A close relative of my wife was institutionalized as a result of measles encephalitis.
I also have two nephews-in-law who are autistic and are not self-sufficient.
I do not accept most of what Kennedy says, but I do understand people who want simple answers.
Here’s the thing. Kennedy may be entirely full of it, but if it turns out that studies have been hidden away, or relevant studies not done, he’s going to have an audience.
But this is one of the points where Kennedy Jr. is full of it. The studies have been done when he says studies have not been done. Kennedy Jr. says, “I need to see the data” while refusing to take a look at the data.
He is like you. You say “Why are witnesses not stepping forward?” refusing to see the witnesses who have stepped forward. Totally full of it.
I gave Trump credit for supporting vaccines. This’ll teach me. This is the Geiers, mentioned in my piece. Geier Sr lost his license to practice. Geier Jr has no qualifications to be Kennedy’s “autism tzar”, and their long-term belief in the autism-vaccine-mercury link further disqualifies him.
Thimerosal/thiomersal was removed from most vaccines in 1999, as a precaution. So that lurid “Every. Single. One” wraparound is way out of date.
This is what we’re up against. Misinfo at the highest level. Table salt is a poison if you have enough of it. “We have to keep this concentrated solution in a special holder, so any concentration of it must be harmful”.
petrushka,
The mother of a friend lost 4 siblings in the same day to measles.
petrushka,
He already has a huge audience, convinced irrespective of evidence that the medical and scientific world is covering up, spurred on by bulging suitcases of money from Big Pharma. They know what is true.
Of course malpractice should be called out. But it seems to trouble people little that Wakefield was struck off, his paper retracted, or that several ivermectin studies have been found to contain fraud or, to be charitable, serious data anomalies. They are very selective in their concerns over malpractice.
Allan Miller,
I agree with you quantity is most likely the issue. Are their clear guide lines established?
Allan:
It was pure political expediency. He wanted RFK’s voters, and he had to offer a position in the administration in exchange for RFK’s endorsement. Trump’s current “flexibility” on vaccines is also politically expedient. He doesn’t care about lives — the 14 million projected deaths due to aid cuts make that abundantly clear. He cares about what’s best for Trump, and appealing to the anti-vax/medical conspiracy folks is politically beneficial. It’s a net gain.
That’s not necessarily to say that RFK hasn’t swayed Trump’s opinions in the meantime. Trump is a stupid man, easily swayed, and he’s notorious for the fact that his positions on an issue often match those of whoever last had his ear.
‘Children have died!’ Trump admin hatches scheme to prove Covid shots harm pregnant women
It is weird how all the people he’s appointed were already familiar to me as contrarians from the early days – before even vaccines were available. Consensus opinions are virtually unrepresented.
Vicki Male was a good follow on Twitter. A professor of reproductive immunology, she cut through the bullshit in unflappable style. It was her job to protect women and babies, and she was in no doubt that pregnant women should be vaccinated. Pregnancy is an effective comorbidity, similar to obesity in that it reduces lung volume, raises blood pressure and makes proning difficult, all of which are associated with worse Covid outcomes. Study after study shows better outcomes for mother and baby in the vaccinated. Distressing cases of mothers kept to term on life support. But these dangerous fools, with their “won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children” opportunism, would persuade mothers otherwise.
keiths,
As evidenced by this, completely incompatible with prior statements for which I gave him credit. How can one appear even slightly balanced when he pisses on his chips in such a manner?! Hello TDS, my old friend.
There’s also RFK and “Trump deserves a Nobel for Operation Warp Speed” followed shortly by ‘no-one knows if the vaccines saved lives’. I wouldn’t necessarily say they were stupid, but they struggle to think straight.
Yes. Although it’s moot, since it stopped being used (except for some flu vaccines) in 1999. You don’t get this fuss with mercury in amalgam, for some reason.
Kennedy’s looking into the causes of gun deaths. I can help here: it’s guns.
Given your experience with the guy by now, what encourages you to think that you can help?
Allan Miller,
People are not longer needed to pull the trigger. 🙂
Nuclear weapons don’t kill people, people kill people.
Here is Kennedy’s NIH director Battacharya parroting a lame antivax talking point: hospitals were incentivised to diagnose Covid by payments of ‘tens of thousands of dollars’. This is both insulting and stupid.
1) It accuses doctors of fraud. They don’t think it’s Covid, but say so to get their hospitals cash. In the UK, deaths certs are covered by the Perjury Act; I don’t know it’s the same in the US, but here it would be a crime with a possible jail sentence. Even without death, they are lying for money; surely an offence? So prove it.
2) It assumes that an employee would commit such fraud just to get their employer money, not even themselves. I doubt many would do that.
3) It believes people in the general case are motivated to do wrong for money. People who think this. I feel, reveal something about themselves. Or, if they would not, what makes them the only virtuous ones? As Bernie Sanders lambasted Kennedy: “everyone’s corrupt… but you?”
4) It ignores the experience of the rest of the world (Americans seem frequently unaware of the outer world!). These payments fall out of an insurance-based healthcare system. If companies had to shoulder the burden of a pandemic alone, the industry would collapse. So government steps in. In. But in places with a taxation-funded system, these payments aren’t made. And yet we had just as much Covid death and hospitalisation.
At the end of the above clip, the interviewer climbs aboard a hobby-horse of his own: “they had 4 comorbidities. No-one wants to…” as if this was a dirty secret no-one dare mention. Yet comorbidities (especially obesity, hypertension, Alzheimer’s and diabetes) predispose people to die of Covid. It’s not as if they must always die ‘with Covid, ‘of’ comorbidity. Covid killed ’em. Another depressingly common antivax talking point.
Obviously didn’t know about Chalie Kirk when writing that. However odious someone’s opinions, violence is clearly unacceptable.
Looks like a professional political assassination. A whole raft of people posted predictions yesterday, on Twitter and elsewhere. Posted as warnings.
I won’t be surprised if the shooter isn’t found. I’m sure the FBI will be looking at cell phone records. But it’s like a Agatha Christi novel with way too many suspects.
Anyway, it will generate the kind of interest that the Kennedy assassinations generated.
petrushka,
Straight into conspiracy mode. Any examples? It does look odd, from the bare facts, but all we can really say is that the shooter had good aim and an escape plan.
“We mustn’t jump to conclusions, but he definitely didn’t have mental health issues, and definitely was a Democrat. Or paid by them.” said MAGA yesterday
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/who-is-omar-najra-galvz-trans-teen-allegedly-connected-to-charlie-kirks-death-after-cryptic-tweet-something-will-happen-669801.html
We can say a great deal more than that. We can say that at least several people posted detailed predictions: shot, tomorrow.
We can say that at least two people impeded the search for the shooter by pretending to be suspects. One of them carried a rifle.
There may be other red herrings. The current person of interest may turn out to be a false trail.
What we know for certain is the shooter was competent and clever, and that he had an effective escape plan. A person has been identified, but who knows whether he is the shooter.
There’s a picture making the rounds on the internet of a rifle with the scope mounted in an unusable way.
Being the internet, it could be a fake picture, but if not, someone is pranking the police. The guy filmed on the roof is probably not the shooter.
If he’s deliberately misleading the police, he’s an accomplice.
petrushka,
Nothing like the dopamine hit of conspracism, eh?
I tried to delete the last comment moments after making it, but a database error prevented it.
Anyway, the guy on the roof is in custody, turned in by his father.
Edit: now hearing his father convinced him to turn himself in. A significant difference.
How about a token bet on whether multiple people knew about this in advance?
Two parts: 1. knew about it, day and place; 2. assisted in some measure.
I’m willing to be wrong and admit it. How about you.
I’m told it’s legal to own that rifle in Germany. I’m willing to be wrong about that also.
“Legal to own a firearm” in a normal country is a whole different animal compared to USA. In normal countries there are background checks, always, and the checks are usually more serious than when getting a driver’s license. And legal to own a firearm does not mean legal to carry it with you wherever you go.
In contrast, I’m told that according to UVU (the location of the assassination) policy, it is legal to carry your legal firearm on the campus. This kind of policy can only happen in some fatally messed up country, such as USA.
petrushka,
I’m not making any predictions, so have no need to make a bet. It is quite possible he’s a full-on Democrat; they are not more immune to evil than any other group. It’s also possible he isn’t. Maybe he acted alone, maybe it’s a plot.
Dunno.
Initial reports are that the guy was not, in any way, ‘left-leaning’. Nor trans. Indeed he seems to have aligned with the Groyper movement, pro-Trump but regarded Kirk as a ‘sell-out’. Which is bizarre. Trump is more right-wing than Kirk?. Extraordinary.
Apologies for leaping to conclusions will no doubt be in preparation from all the figures and media who have pinned this on the Left.
Allan Miller:
Bizarrely there is a deep rift in American right-wing extremism where both sides are anti-Kirk. According to the groyper movement (Nick Fuentes), Kirk (and Trump!) is not fascist enough. On the other hand, according to Laura “Trump Whisperer” Loomer, Charlie Kirk is to be denounced as “charlatan” because he (Kirk) wanted Epstein files published and he had failed to praise Trump when Trump bombed Iran.
As such, if the killer is ideological, it is entirely possible that he is some flavour of extreme right-wing. It is also possible that the killer is not ideological.
There’s a lot of pictures and such on the internet. Unlike some shooters, he seems to be completely sane and without any history of psychological problems. But for some reason he thought killing Kirk was a morally correct thing to do.
Several hundred people online have agreed with him, including doctors and mental health professionals. Even Steven King.
As for the gun, I’ve read he didn’t own it. That’s an internet rumor.
Neither did Kyle Rittenhouse, the American 2nd Amendment hero, own his gun.
Well, in Germany, political opponents aren’t shot, but they seem to die anyway.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ykyewrerpo
To seem to have forgotten to post a link to your source.
Rittenhouse is no hero of mine, but he was tried and acquitted. I have little sympathy for people who go looking for trouble.
petrushka,
Here are King’s posts since Kirk’s murder. Perhaps you could point to the one where he “agrees with him” re: murder.
I search in vain for links to your own Miss-Marpling on the Internet.
I know his sources. I wish I did not.
I was wrong to use the word professional. It implies a paid hit man.
It was however, not a mentally ill person, but someone deeply familiar with police procedures, and someone who acted out of conviction, and planned meticulously. If his family hadn’t intervened, he might still be at large.
I’ve lived through a number of assassinations and attempts. Most involved people with little sense of self preservation, and really sketchy political motives. This one is unusual.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people cheered online, and millions pushed the like button.
petrushka,
The online cheering is distasteful. But let’s not pretend the Right are all sweetness and light. I’ve seen a lot of anti-Left hatred centred around this, and previously. I’m surprised no-one took to the streets.
People are still trying to pretzel themselves to associate him with the Left, despite no evidence. “He went to university”. For, like, a term. Anyone thinks universities can turn us into murderers has never been near one. Now people are softening, hoping he accepts Jesus. Preferably before they execute him.
How about Bluesky?
So, what’s the definition of vaccination and an anti-vax?
A vaccine is a product which induces an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen.
Antivax means someone who campaigns against some or all vaccines.
petrushka,
Do you think it impossible to find someone on the Right advocating violence? Here’s one I reported yesterday (for all the good it’ll do): “I’ll let you pick the tree, let’s get it over with n*****”. In response to a mild comment.
This illustrates a point I made earlier, people on the Right have a tendency to find everyone guilty of the sins of the few. There are shitheads on both sides. Is this news?
petrushka,
That’s King agreeing with his murder is it? Righto.
Just heard an antivax couple haranguing the fishmonger at our local market. “Friend of ours has IBS, came on straight after the vaccine”. “Undertakers are finding clots”. “Can’t do a blood test because it solidifies immediately in the air.” “Well, we have to take what they tell us as true” says the fishmonger. “Not any more” says the wife, darkly.
It was presumably prompted by an NHS van and display prompting childhood vaccination. I wanted to slap them with my hake fillet. Or talk about correlation and causation, confirmation bias and why we are relying on undertakers to do post mortems now. But what’s the point?
I’m not shocked to find extreme opinions. I’ve always thought extremism was a personality trait, orthogonal to ideology.
I’ve never had an opinion I didn’t disagree with. The world doesn’t provide me with GOD certified facts, so I conjecture, and am frequently wrong.
What I care most about is not being continuously correct, but about organizing my life to account for all the people who are correct. People who have certainty are more assertive than me, often more successful, have more money and power. It takes work to avoid them.
What I’m observing now is another cancel culture. I’ve never like cancel culture. I’ve never wanted to shut anyone down or prevent them from speaking. The idea of working to get people fired is abhorrent to me. But I find it strange that people would say things on line that could get them fired.
I’ve posted a few dozen times on Twitter/X, mostly about cats.