Day 566: Vexxed by the Unvaxxed

One-time skeptic and ongoing editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer recently wrote an article for Quillette about how vexxed he is by vaccine skeptics. After confessing to scolding an employee for her skepticism, he goes into the usual irrelevant risk analogies (yes, the vaccine is less risky than driving, but so is COVID itself), superficial political analysis (no, being pro-life doesn't automatically make you pro-vaxx anymore than it makes you anti-death-penalty), and conflation of vaccination against diseases of childhood with mass adult vaccination against a disease that barely affects children. Vaccine reluctance was summed up much better by a commenter (aptly pseudonamed Sane World):

There may be a fourth reason, not mentioned by the author, why people hesitate to get vaccinated. After the numerous drastic coercive measures of the last twenty months, many of which were previously unknown in liberal western democracies, some people may simply be tired of constantly being persuaded, exhorted, pressured, lied to, incited, coerced, bullied, humiliated, denounced, threatened, criminalized, and punished into submission to an increasingly totalitarian mode of government.

On the irony front, the governor of Texas has come down with COVID. Despite having just tested positive, being vaccinated, and showing no symptoms, he's being treated with Regeneron.

Massachusetts cases were up to a new local high of a fifth of a percentage point yesterday. Our governor remains uninfected.

P.S. Cases were up a fifth of a percentage point again on Thursday, and rumor has it that the Somerville city council Board of Health voted to put us back under the mask (indoors).