You are correct. Even professional riders can’t keep bicycles upright. Witness last weekend’s Paris Roubaix, for example:
Yep, complicated. And there are still things we don’t understand about it, but there are myriad functions and processes we understand thoroughly and with certainty. As a layperson, I understand less about them than scientists do, so until I learn and understand, its functions and processes might seem more complex and unknowable than they actually are to scientists.
mRNA and how it works are not unknowable. Scientists have been studying it since it was first isolated 60 years ago, so we do understand thoroughly how it works. Furthermore,
Human trials of cancer vaccines using the same mRNA technology have been taking place since at least 2011. ‘If there was a real problem with the technology, we’d have seen it before now for sure,’ said Prof. Goldman.
We’ve had 10 years’ experience with mRNA vaccines. That should be reassuring.
Fun video, thanks for sharing. My takeaway from that video is that the reason we don’t have a complete scientific theory for bicycles isn’t because it’s complicated, but rather that nobody cares. There’s no funding.
The other takeaway I got from it is that the bicycle puzzle was fully solvable through just trial and error, and we successfully did that over a hundred years ago. No underlying theory required. Thus the lack of interest in funding research to uncover the theory.
Is it worth noting that “nurse” is a big category that includes RNs with BSc degrees and care aids who may not have a high school diploma? And that practical nurses and care aids get paid badly, are overworked, and get no respect? All things that might make someone angry and hurt and ready to lash out, if in stupid, stupid, ways, like “asserting their autonomy” by not getting vaccinated. Not a justification, but when we create shitty jobs, people don’t become more reasonable and thoughtful
In the US the only people legally entitled to call themselves nurses are LPNs, with a year of specialized education and RNs, with anywhere from 2 years of community college to 4 years of college. The N in both LPN and RN represent ‘nurse’. If you don’t have the education and haven’t subsequently passed the appropriate licensing exam and gained licensure, you don’t get to represent yourself as a nurse, practical or otherwise.
Aids can be anything from self-declared to CNAs, which in my state requires 40-80 hours of classroom and practical experience, then they can register with the state and become a Certified Nurses Aid.
That is roughly true in BC as well, but people here may refer to all of the categories of work as “nurses,” even when technically incorrect. And while education is not a vaccination against ignorance, selfishness, or debilitating, unfocused anger, here very few of the anti-vaxxers with public profiles working in health care are RNs but rather people with fewer qualifications and troubled histories with the medical profession. My point is simply that marginalized, hurt people and people with economic insecurity are often less likely to make good decisions when they have the chance to assert some autonomy, leading them to take ridiculous and counter-productive stands. Such stands of course are not limited to such people, but their deprivation and anger make such people vulnerable.
Or higher - i.e. a nurse practitioner typically has a two year master’s degree on top of that (and many graduate programs require a minimum of two years work experience before admittance) up to a DNP ( Doctor of Nursing Practice, another year or three). Plus the panoply of other advanced nursing specialists or academic PhDs.
Of course even a PhD (or MD for that matter) isn’t necessarily a perfect shield against irrationality. Humans being crazy and all.
PhD is actually one of the big anti-vax demographics. Not in absolute numbers but by percentage.
Has anyone formulated a hypothesis explaining that one? Seems weird to me.
PhD are easier to get now, as there are more institutions that offer them and they might be considered a stepping stone in some fields. Requirements for getting them almost certainly vary considerably from one institution to the next – my WAG anyway.
IIRC, this was based on a single survey, and people with PhDs are a small minority of the population, so it’s plausible that there could have been some sampling issues.
cite?
I saw someone claim that on another forum, and it turned out his source was an anonymous internet poll in which people self-reported their educational status. That poll featured a lot of irregularities, like people reporting that their pronouns were “transgender is a made-up category”.
The marginalized in many cases are also likely marginalized in no small part because they’re less educated, and being less educated in an economy that is increasingly complex and information-based makes them less competitive. Just to be clear, my point isn’t ‘They deserve to be poor,’ but there’s often a relationship between education and economic outcomes.
But as one poster already remarked, there’s at least anecdotal evidence that vaccine resistance is a phenomenon that we’re seeing even among people with advanced levels of education. This is more baffling, but as I said earlier, I suspect that this is partly attributable to the democratization of advanced degrees. I also blame it on social media. It’s just easier to consume bad information these days.
OK then, there were at least two surveys, because I think I just found one of the original sources for this claim, and there’s no question about pronouns on the survey (and the number of PhDs in the sample was way higher than I thought it would be, much too high for a few quirky people to skew the results). That said, some of the issues about self-reporting may still apply.
The information about this experience with mRNA vaccines should be spread. But who could spread that info to the vaccine hesitant?
Exactly. Even the authors of that poll found discrepancies suggesting dishonesty in the answers.
I read Medscape updates every day, an the comments by people who at least purport to be medical professionals are a very mixed bag.
Yep, looks like that was it. Better than a hypothesis, an actual answer. Here’s a cite that goes into details:
Even HR people realize that job stress can make people irrational and angry, and I cannot help but think that is part of what fuels the anti-maskers. No-job stress too. An angry worker can do a lot of damage - Post Bulletin | Rochester Minnesota news, weather, sports
Sure, but an angry ex-worker can help us with shortages at fast food establishments (just stick to drive through if this is how things play out).
Burn! I love it.