Thread by @amandaknox

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’d like to share a little family story about vaccines and conspiracy theories.

/ a thread

My mom was born in Germany in 1962. When she was about 9 months old, she developed a high fever and a rash. My oma brought her to the doctor, and she was diagnosed with measles.

There was no measles vaccine available yet. That wouldn’t come until the following year. And without it, mortality rates were high, especially for children under five. The measles was twice as deadly as Polio.

My oma grew up in Wien, Austria during WWII. She was born in 1937 and had a traumatic early life. When she was four, her mother died in a bombing. Her father became a POW.

Without her parents, she was raised by her oma, who once tried to sell her younger sister for a box of tomatoes. That’s how starving they were. She also tried to drown my oma in a bathtub, to save her from dying of hunger.

Despite all this, she managed to survive. She eventually met an American GI and had children. My mom was her first daughter. Her hope for a better future. And now, that baby girl had the measles.

The doctors couldn’t get her fever under control. My oma asked what she could do, and they looked at her with pity: this poor woman, she didn’t get it. “Please tell me,” she begged them. “How can I save her?”

They sent her home and said, “Try to keep her comfortable. Try to keep her cool.” So my oma brought her infant daughter home, expecting her to die.

For two weeks, she bathed my mother in ice-water, and day after day, the fever wouldn’t break. She hoped for a miracle.

This shouldn’t be a spoiler, but... my mom survived. My oma? She remained stoic. Life was full of such challenges. A year later, her son, my uncle, brought home the mumps from school.

There was no mumps vaccine yet available. That would come in three years. Everyone in the family got it, including my mom. But strangely, her sister, my aunt, didn’t have the telltale fever or respiratory problems. She seemed okay. She wasn’t.

The disease had infected her inner ear. It happens in about 4% of cases. As a result, she became deaf in her left ear. To this day, my mom has to remember to walk on the right side of her sister.

The type of life-threatening emergency my mom experienced as an infant, and the life-long damage my aunt suffered, became rare with the widespread use of vaccines for measles and mumps.

This wasn’t that long ago. That’s one generation. In my family, the memory of a world without vaccines is still painfully fresh.

But I know that for many, that world seems long gone. The incalculable benefits of vaccines do not seem obvious. And in that void, conspiracy thrives. Bill Gates wants to put a microchip under your skin! The vaccine makes you magnetic, infertile, it rewrites your DNA!

I’m frankly not surprised that this kind of thinking is so rampant about something that is so obviously a net good for society in the midst of a deadly pandemic. After all, I remain the subject of a conspiracy theory myself.

I’ve learned that the people most convinced of my guilt cannot be persuaded by reason or evidence to believe in my innocence. They didn’t arrive at their conclusions based on reason and evidence; why would it lead them to change their mind?

When we first met, my husband @manunderbridge fell into this trap. He thought he could become a troll-whisperer, that with just the right words, he might convince at least one of the many guilters out there to reconsider my innocence. He’s a sharp and eloquent man. He failed.

“It is nearly impossible to convince people of what they don’t want to believe,” @ezraklein writes regarding vaccine skepticism in the @nytimes.

nytimes.com/2021/07/29/opi…

I know this to be true from personal experience. And the research shows how common motivated reasoning is, and how things much deeper than logic and argumentation shape our beliefs.

My favorite book on this subject is @JonHaidt's The Righteous Mind. It’s required reading at the School of Hard Knox.

bookshop.org/books/the-righ…

So what do you do when you can’t convince the unconvincible? For me, that means ignoring the guilters and finding support among those who are willing to see the real me, to engage with my humanity. I can’t win over the trolls. But I don’t have to.

For society, it means shaping the incentive structures with carrots and sticks. That means making it very annoying to be unvaccinated, and yes, rewarding those who finally get a shot. No, the holdouts don’t deserve prizes for getting vaccinated, but our alternative is more death.

As @ezraklein points out, “We do not solely rely on argumentation to persuade people to wear seatbelts.” And “Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine mandates, not just public education.”

I'm not saying we need a mandate. I don’t have definitive answers to this situation. But I do know that conspiracy-minded thinking almost destroyed my life, and that I almost never existed thanks to the measles. ...But here I am. I’m hopeful we’ll figure this out.