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A friend of mine has expressed concern about a Covid vaccine and unknown long term effects. He points to thalidomide as an example of a drug people were told would be great for reliving morning sickness and a few years later not so much.
Vaccines also go wrong from time to time like the Cutter Incident. Combine that with a view that they are unlikely to get whatever the disease is and there is a more reasonable worry.
Then there are vaccines which go against some other rule, for example the flu vaccine that is pork based so not halal (lots of religious leaders say you can ignore that rule but there is always a different religious opinion available).
And so the list goes on before you get to microchip implantation (why wouldn't you want that???)
jellybaby-
Yes, but those are obviously not bonkers arguments. I was talking more about what dubtap mentions and what Brommers says.
I don't have any problems with it when people are afraid of vaccines--I think fear like that is quite natural. However, as with all kinds of fear, where people then completely refuse to have it addressed and instead dig their heels in, and become increasingly traumatised and irrational, that's where I don't understand how that comes to be tied to vaccines (of all things).
I completely understand worries about unknown long-term side effects happening, but again it depends on how you handle that. It seems pretty clear that most vaccines have worked well for some time now.
The worry about the animal origin of some vaccines I suppose is twofold--one that I share is that I don't want to use animal products for ethical reasons (although I've probably been vaccinated with one or several while not knowing their origins), and the other side, which I don't share because I don't understand it, is that people seem to worry about vaccinating against viruses that have jumped the species barrier by using vaccines derived from other species. I don't think the second worry is bonkers, either, and perhaps there's a perfectly easy explanation, but there again I'm sure there are people who forcibly resist explanation, etc.
As always, there are plenty of things to fear quite rationally, e.g. falling off a 200-foot cliff (meaning that the fear is aligned with reason, not that the emotion itself is rational), but for some reason some people have hit on this complex of bizarre beliefs that don't seem to be subject to rational penetration at all, and by that I mean the things one hears about on t'Internet, and especially, perhaps, the ways in which people attempt to 'connect' them.
Oliver Schick
I've never understood where anti-vaxxers even come from. Normally, if people have bonkers views there's at least the possibility of constructing some kind of rationale, e.g. of working out what it is they've misunderstood. With anti-vaxxing, I've never even got to first base when attempting that.