“I’ve been reading…” That was the response I received from one of the staffers of Skeptic magazine when I asked why she wasn’t vaccinated. My query came on the saddest day in our 30-year history—we were mourning the death of Pat Linse, the Art Director, co-founder of the magazine and the Skeptics Society, and my business partner, friend, and confidant of three decades. Pat was 73, overweight, and in poor health, so she was in the high morbidity cohort for contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produces the COVID-19 disease. As she was herself vaccinated, socially isolated, and hyper-vigilant about outsiders coming into the office, I just assumed everyone else in the office was vaccinated.
Pat’s cause of death was not COVID-19. Nevertheless, Skeptic has been at the forefront of debunking conspiracy theories and quackery related to the pandemic, so the discovery that one of our staffers had not been vaccinated was troubling. “I read about people having seizures, getting violently sick, having heart attacks, and even dying from the vaccine,” she explained. “And getting injected with a foreign substance like that just doesn’t seem like a healthy thing to do.” Her reasons for being vaccine hesitant are not unique and are shared by tens of millions of people, who have also “been reading.” Google readily provides a massive trove of misinformation, disinformation, lies, damn lies, and distorted statistics.
Read Full Article »