One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic took from me was the chance to see the concerts and performances that my daughters would have had at the end of their freshman and senior years. One of the things I was given in their place was a chance to argue with vaccine skeptics online.<\/p>\n
Some of the people who rejected the Covid-19 vaccines were always vaccine denialists, while others slid from hesitancy to skepticism to outright rejection. They all tried to sound coolly rational about it, but surprisingly few of them actually said something like: \u201cSorry, not for me. The science is real and I\u2019m grateful for the vaccines and other medical treatments, but I\u2019m young and healthy, and the risks from Covid are low enough that I\u2019ll sit this one out.\u201d I could almost understand that perspective \u2013 no one likes needles, and I react badly enough to vaccinations that a full course of injections and boosters collectively laid me out about as long and as badly as my actual Covid infection. (After a few people my age or younger in my extended circle of family and friends died from Covid, I\u2019ll keep taking my shots when recommended, thank you very much.)<\/p>\n
But if you pushed back on the skepticism, you would start to hear things like: The vaccine trials were rushed. I\u2019m avoiding the risk of myocarditis. I\u2019m waiting for a traditional, better-understood vaccine. There are cheaper treatments that work just as well, like Vitamin D, Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine.<\/p>\n
So you pushed back a little more and talked about statistics and study design, and how the studies caught signals for even rare side-effects like myocarditis; and that none of the alternative treatments were ever found to work better than placebo in large, randomized controlled trials; and that it\u2019s very clear that excess deaths rose with Covid and fell with vaccination.<\/p>\n
But the human thirst for confirmation being what it is, the rejoinder soon came: You can\u2019t trust Big Pharma to report honestly on the vaccine trials. You can\u2019t trust the FDA, NIH, or other government agencies. They suppressed cheap interventions that could have saved millions (or didn\u2019t test for the proper dosage of zinc). Ultimately, you arrived at a place of nihilistic skepticism where no government official, Republican or Democrat or other, of any nation in the world, could be trusted; and all pharmaceutical companies and medical personnel (except for a brave few on YouTube) and scientific journals were part of a global, coordinated effort to suppress the truth. After the demolition of all ways of discovering or having confidence in medical knowledge, \u201cIt\u2019s the lizard people who control everything\u201d is one of the less noxious explanations people are left with.<\/p>\n
As I watched this play out, it felt familiar. It was like watching discussions of sexual morality on Mormon blogs over the last few decades.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Why do we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe what we do about sexual morality (the \u201cLaw of Chastity\u201d), which limits the expression of sexual intimacy to married men and women?<\/p>\n
We might describe the sources of our knowledge as ancient scripture, modern scripture, and prophetic counsel. Yet after an apostle says in General Conference that sex outside marriage is wrong or cites the Proclamation on the Family<\/a>, online discussion follows a familiar pattern.<\/p>\n