How Will Vaccine Skeptics View Vaccine Beer?

Seriously. I’m asking with an open heart.

On Martin Luther King’s birthday, I traditionally find some sermons I haven’t read yet. In between the birthdays, there are two sermons I keep going back to over and over again: “Loving Your Enemies” and “The Drum Major Instinct.” This passage, in particular, percolates up to the surface of my mind whenever I’m talking to people I passionately disagree with.

The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I’m in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.

So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes.”

In case you haven’t guessed from the name of my blog, I’m passionately pro-vax. You might think I’d be disgusted by the fact that some members of my extended family are anti-vaxxers, but I love these family members very deeply. If MLK can call his jailers brothers, then surely I can find love for family members I already love? How hard can these supposedly difficult conversations really be?

However open-hearted I may start off feeling, the vaccine conversations unfortunately have to spend a little effort up front establishing that I’m not the type of scientist who people perceive as an elitist snob that sneers about how deplorably ignorant the unwashed masses are. It’s disheartening that my loved ones start off expecting me to screech at them. Fellow scientists, please! These conversations would be so much easier if we could all make an effort to cut it out with the appearance of sneering. I wish I didn’t have to carefully remind my loved ones that I’m actually the type of scientist who believes valid critiques can come from surprising directions (see: this blog). I’m also the type of scientist who believes that if somebody isn’t understanding my ideas then that’s mostly on me for failing to explain the ideas in terms the listener can understand. Or it might be an indication my ideas are incorrect - a thing that sadly happens quite a lot. Although maybe it’s not so sad. Throwing one bad idea into the recycle bin often makes room for shinier new ideas to take center stage.

In my perception of a typical anti-vaxxer viewpoint, a central animating force is a distrust of institutional scientists. By which I mean scientists who work for Big Pharma, major research institutions, or government regulatory bodies. I’m at least somewhat adjacent to all three of those things at once - but I take great pride in refusing to be tribalistic about it. I certainly wouldn’t say I trust institutions. If that sounds a little tinfoil-hat, then I urge you to watch the brilliant Hulu series Dopesick - which dramatizes the FDA’s approval of disastrously unsupported Big Pharma safety claims for oxycontin. Institutional authorities are conclusively unworthy of blind trust.

Although I can easily understand anti-vaxxer wariness toward institutional scientists, I’m troubled by what I see as credulity toward independent scientists¹ and the political podcasters who host them. I strive to adopt the same healthy skepticism toward independent scientists that I apply to institutional scientists.

Which brings us to vaccine beer. I was forced to temporarily take off my institutional scientist hat to develop vaccine beer as an independent scientist. My institutional colleagues urged me not to follow this disobedient path, because we all know the FDA/Big Pharma track is the only respectable way to develop vaccines. When I told one colleague about the idea that vaccines could be dietary supplements, he asked “why would you want to get in bed with those assholes?” I gently reminded him that some of the assholes might sometimes be making valid points. We then proceeded to develop a list of the dietary supplement products the colleague swears by.

From my vantage point, institutional scientists typically put too much faith in institutional authority, while being too casual in their dismissal of all independent scientists as dangerous snake oil salesmen. We really gotta work on this sneering problem.

The vaccine skeptics I’ve talked to so far seem pretty interested in vaccine beer, so long as I reassure them I’m not trying to slip it into their tap water². For that part of the discussion, it helps to note that our institutional research paper shows manufacturers how to turn the vaccine yeast a lurid hot pink. It’s not exactly what a moustache-twirling Institutional Scientist would do if he were trying to secretly sneak something into the food supply.

The issue at the base of this post is that my loved ones love me too - so they’re hardly offering me a representative view of what strangers might think about vaccine beer. Hearing other viewpoints might help us figure out how to quickly make vaccine beer a mass-market reality. If anybody’s at a family gathering with vaccine skeptics this holiday season, you’d be doing me a huge favor if you can channel your inner MLK and ask - in as loving and open-hearted a fashion as you possibly can - to hear more about their thinking. It should ideally be more like neutral sociology research than an attempt to screech any sort of vaccine gospel.

Alternatively, you could invite vaccine skeptic friends to please directly post some comments here on this blog. I really mean it about trying my very best to implement MLK’s teaching that it’s healthier for me to love my alleged so-called enemies. Read the sermon. It might convince you too³.

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Song of the day:

1. I recently revisited Adam Mastroianni’s classic post, “An invitation to a secret society.” It made me resolve to turn over a new leaf and start using the word “scientist” more inclusively. I’d hate to get a karate chop! When I use the term “independent scientist,” I mean it to apply to anybody using the scientific method outside of an institutional power structure. You know, like Charles Darwin. Or RFKJ. I’m not saying the latter is a good scientist, but he says he’s trying to use the method  - which I guess counts, in some weird way.

2. Sorry, vaccine skeptics. I can’t resist a little friendly ribbing:

3. Maybe just reading this one little bit will start to convince you:

“There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.”