Well it must be more something you don't like, or you'd just do it, right?

Well it must be more something you don't like, or you'd just do it, right? — Srap Tasmaner

Why must my motive only be selfish? Has nothing I've said about my motives been taken with even the slightest benefit of an assumption of honesty?

I had a quick look for more studies, and found only a small study at Qatar University that did not have sufficient granularity to reproduce the results.

Not selfish, but meaningful to you, something that makes sense to you, is reasonable to you. You're the one making the choice, what else could your reasons be?

As near as I can tell, the most you can claim so far is that you're doing your part to keep too many people in the UK (yes?) from getting vaccinated. If the UK has already reached herd immunity, then good for you. If not, then you're advancing the wrong goal, aren't you?

I had a quick look for more studies, and found only a small study at Qatar University that did not have sufficient granularity to reproduce the results. — Banno

Shame. The authors now seems to think a mass conspiracy of fraudulent responses was to blame, possible with the numbers.

It just sounds really wierd to me, to set up such a survey, put in all that work and then within days say "the results aren't to be trusted". I've rejected some bad study methodologies in my time, but... here we've got a very politically sensitive topic where the researchers have been confident enough in their methodology to go to preprint, got a politically unpopular result and then turned round and said their methodology was shite afterall.

Whatever comes of it, and whatever actually happened, it doesn't do objective science any favours.

The authors now seems to think a mass conspiracy of fraudulent responses was to blame, possible with the numbers. — Isaac

Where's that?

Seems to me that spotting fraud would be fairly straight forward in such a big study. If 5% of respondents claimed to have a PhD, I would bet on a fraud. It seems unlikely that FaceBook has special appeal for PhD recipients...

Do you have access to more details?

As near as I can tell, the most you can claim so far is that you're doing your part to keep too many people in the UK (yes?) from getting vaccinated. If the UK has already reached herd immunity, then good for you. If not, then you're advancing the wrong goal, aren't you? — Srap Tasmaner

Well, the world needs herd immunity, not just the UK.

I just can't see how this is so complicated, it's like people are doing this convoluted mental gymnastics to get the media message to fit.

There's not enough x for everyone who needs it. Taking a x when others need it more is wrong.

That seems like a relatively tried and tested moral position.

You could argue that I do need it, you could argue that others around me need me to take it, but those would both be technical arguments. I'll even grant you've the consensus on your side there.

But the moral argument, given what I believe (with appropriate qualified justification, of course) about the technical case... I really can't see the difficulty.

Frank found this https://www.wnct.com/news/north-carolina/fact-check-setting-the-record-straight-on-claims-about-vaccine-hesitancy-among-ph-d-s/
But I can't access it, for some reason (EU data laws or something), so he summarised it for me here

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/585094

That's all I've got to go on I'm afraid.

Frank was a bit selective. Here's the whole text:

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — Some skeptics who question the vaccine are pointing to a survey that found a high rate of hesitancy among people who have Ph.D. degrees.

CBS17.com tracked down one of the authors of the study that’s based on those survey results, and while she says the numbers are accurate, they might not mean what the questioners think it does.

THE CLAIM: Nearly a quarter of people with Ph.D. degrees responding to a survey expressed hesitancy about the vaccines, with the implication that if some of the most educated people have questions about them, then perhaps more people should, too.

THE FACTS: Researchers Robin Mejia at Carnegie-Mellon University and Wendy C. King of the University of Pittsburgh based their study of vaccine hesitancy rates off of results from a Facebook Data for Good survey, reviewing about 1 million responses each month between January and May and analyzing it by race, education, region and support of former President Donald Trump.

READ THE PREPRINT OF THE STUDY HERE

They found 23.9 percent of the people who said they hold Ph.D. degrees expressed hesitancy, the highest rate among the various levels of education.

But some of their work appears to be misrepresented online, missing the overall point that hesitancy dropped.

“There are people that can kind of take a data point and twist it around to mean something that it doesn’t mean, and that’s unfortunate,” King said.

A sensitivity analysis found some people answered in the extreme ends of some demographic categories to throw off some of the numbers. King said it appeared to be a “concerted effort” that “did make the hesitancy prevalence in the Ph.D. group look higher than it really is.”

For example, they observed higher hesitancy rates than expected in the oldest age group — 75 and over — as well as the top end in terms of education level.

“We found that people basically used it to write in political … statements,” King said. “So they weren’t genuine responses. They didn’t really complete the survey in good faith.”

There were some other issues.

The study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.

People taking the survey were on the honor system, with no way to make sure people who claimed to have Ph.D. degrees actually have them.

And the Ph.D. group does not include medical doctors or nurses.

“So it’s not representative of the medical profession,” King said.

King is not rejecting the data, but pointing to it's inadequacies - which are much the same as we agreed, above.

The link is to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1.full.pdf . The graphs are clearer in this version.

The data for PhD's is listed on p17, at 2% of respondents. Looks about what one might expect. While one would expect to see about 10% with less than high school education, the figure in the survey is 17%.

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be an age bias, either. It'll be interesting to see the final paper.

It's not a trivial issue. There's still hundreds of very serious medical conditions which need to be monitored and the mismanagement of admission data confuses the picture to no benefit. — Isaac

OK, maybe I didn't read the article closely enough. I agree with you that it's important to get the information as to why a patient has been admitted to hospital right.

There's not enough x for everyone who needs it. Taking a x when others need it more is wrong. — Isaac

Hmmm. This is not what I understood you to be arguing.

If I'm to take you at your word here, your claim is not just that you're under no moral obligation to get vaccinated, but all of us in richer countries are under a moral obligation not to, you, me, basically everyone on this forum, I'd guess.

(I'm assuming there's some geographical grouping going on, that you don't mean the world's population can be ranked individually from 1 to 7 billion whatever in order of need.)

I'm a little confused now and will have a rethink.

I'm a little confused now and will have a rethink. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

While you are at it, ask yourself, if true, how best to go about convincing others to not get it. You know, without turning them off to it. And without turning off those who you are trying to get it to. I suppose you could try to prove that smart people have questions. Yeah, that's the ticket. Sounds pretty moral to me.

Heaven forbid we call it "good" and pour all resources into making it ubiquitous. Better to throw shade. After all, we have horse dewormer and bleach to tide us over. Speaking of tide, we also have Tide. Got a pod, bro?

Thanks. It's this I found odd

A sensitivity analysis found some people answered in the extreme ends of some demographic categories to throw off some of the numbers. King said it appeared to be a “concerted effort” that “did make the hesitancy prevalence in the Ph.D. group look higher than it really is.”

Running a sensitivity analysis on this kind of data is no small undertaking for a start, but I can't see what form of sensitivity analysis they would have run on these numbers without prior assumptions for the expected distributions (for which there wouldn't really be any reasonable ones to make without biasing the methodology). To reduce the phenomena to one which is entirely in line with the 'increasing education decreases hesitancy' model, you'd need below 8% PhDs hesitant, plus we'd need to assume (following the model function) that something like 6% of the 23.9 were genuine PhD holders who were vaccine hesitant. A reduction of 2% was expected, an increase of 16% was found. Explaining this by dishonesty would require, by my calculations, around 1600 dishonest respondents, with the intent to bias the results against the expectation. That sounds a lot to start with, to have all had the same idea, but it's not impossible in the large sample size. But, again, without biasing the interpretation, we'd have to initially assume there were an equal number of people wishing to bias the results in favour of the expectation, so they'd have to so sensitivity analysis on the numbers in favour of the vaccine claiming they had PhDs to make their opinion sound more authoritative. I don't see how, without additional data, their sensitivity analysis could have divided those two groups.

Also

some of their work appears to be misrepresented online, missing the overall point that hesitancy dropped.

Yet they say that

There was not a decrease in hesitancy among those with a professional degree or PhD.

So that's not really a misrepresentation, as far as I can see, though without having the apparently misrepresenting quotes, it's hard to tell.

Finally this is intriguing

the Ph.D. group does not include medical doctors or nurses.

Am I missing something? I don't see the data on what the PhD is in - it would answer a lot of our questions if we could see that. Hopefully that data will be in final paper.

More questions than answers, but thanks for posting the full text anyway.

Am I missing something? — Isaac

Presumably - and I am speculating - the survey included doctors and nurses in the professional qualification category?

Note also that the steady level of the PhD result was commented on; much the same for the duration fo the study, unlike the other levels. Might be simply sample size.

I don't see that anything can be concluded safely.

Explaining this by dishonesty would require, by my calculations, around 1600 dishonest respondents, with the intent to bias the results against the expectation. That sounds a lot to start with, to have all had the same idea, but it's not impossible in the large sample size. But, again, without biasing the interpretation, we'd have to initially assume there were an equal number of people wishing to bias the results in favour of the expectation, — Isaac

To avoid any of that confusion, the authors could have just verified the data.

King is not rejecting the data, b — Banno

So you misrepresent me in retaliation. Ridiculous as usual.

Hmmm. This is not what I understood you to be arguing. — Srap Tasmaner

To be fair, it's not only what I'm arguing, so there's room for justified confusion. I'm more responding to comments than laying out a case, so have no right to expect anyone to 'get it'. I was a little short in my last post in that respect.

In that light, what I'm arguing is an opposition to the moral case for vaccination in all cases (the idea that a moral finger can be wagged simply because someone says "I'm not getting vaccinated" (outside of any medical reason).

The moral case, as I've heard it is this.

1. You ought to be vaccinated because reducing your risk of disease needing hospital care is a moral obligation and the vaccine achieves that.
2. You ought to take the vaccine because reducing your risk of harming others is a moral obligation and vaccine does that by reducing your chances of transmitting the virus.
3. You ought to take the vaccine because there's a global effort to eliminate (or make endemic) the virus by achieving herd immunity and the vaccine is the most efficient way of doing that.

I think all three lack sufficient normative weight.

For (1):

a) this is not conclusively true for all age groups, there's genuine expert dispute about the balance of risks/benefits for the under 24 age bracket, with the weight of naysayers getting higher as you reach the under 12s. It is not normal practice to morally require any offence against bodily autonomy on the grounds of a balance of probabilities, it's normally insufficient to say "it seems slightly more likely than not that this will cause more good than harm, therefore you ought to do it, even if you don't want to". There's just no precedent for such a norm as far as I can see. Normally it need be overwhelmingly clear and with children it is definitely not so.

b) for other age/health groups, whilst this claim is true, it does not necessarily reduce the risk of needing hospital care from a risk which isn't already below the threshold risk we normally accept for various lifestyle choices and activities. We normally only require people to reduce that risk to below a reasonable threshold, we do not normally demand that it is as low as it is possible to get it. It has been countered that being unvaccinated is not an activity or lifestyle choice, or that it is irrational and so doesn't count. I find both arguments to be pretty arbitrary and post hoc, and so uncompelling. What classes as a lifestyle choice is in the eye of the life whose style is in question, otherwise it wouldn't class as a 'choice', and nowhere is it argued that irrational choices are exempt from this reasonableness limitation.

(2) I find most compelling of the three, but my reservations are;

a) the evidence is again only a balance of probabilities; there has only been a few studies and none of them show a strong reduction, none of them divide that reduction into cohorts who might be expected to have lower/higher transmission rates and none of them are wide enough to capture all such cohorts in any case. Again we don't normally require actions against bodily autonomy on the basis of a balance of probabilities - for example the MMR vaccine is not merely 'more likely than not' to be beneficial to the average child and others at their school, it is overwhelmingly and conclusively proven to be so.

b) there's again no understanding of the threshold of reasonableness which is associated with other moral duties. It is not normally required to reduce one's risk of harming others down to as low as it can possibly go, only to below a certain reasonable threshold. Masking, distancing, and hygiene can already do this. A vaccine would do more, but there are hundreds of cases where we could all do more to prevent harm to others (I gave the examples of health and safety precautions, environmental lifestyle changes...). There's no similar moral imperative on those issues.

(3) is the argument we're having now. I don't believe we can justify just any means of achieving that end, no matter how noble the end is. Getting the world to herd immunity requires equitable distribution and, in our current circumstances, that requires prioritising the needy at the expense of those at lower risk. It has been countered that this is pointless because such prioritisation isn't going to happen anyway, but I don't find that compelling because;

a) I'm not a consequentialist. As I said - "There's not enough x for everyone who needs it. Taking a x when others need it more is wrong". I see this as simply moral a truth, for me.

b) I don't think it's at all clear that this is the case. A lower demand in rich countries could well see the pharmaceuticals look more favourably on deals with the poorer ones.

___

I'm also arguing, separately, that there is a finite space of public fora to sway political opinion and spending all of that space of trying to shame a handful of lunatics and smaller handful of legitimate concerned parties is manifestly irresponsible when we are in the midst of a crisis which is almost entirely the result of massive failings by our collective governments and institutions, who are currently sheltering behind the idea that the vaccine hesitant are entirely to blame.

I hope that clears things up.

Presumably - and I am speculating - the survey included doctors and nurses in the professional qualification category? — Banno

Ah, yes, that may be it. But if so, their claim is misleading. The only PhDs excluded from the last category would be active doctors and nurses. The implication they attempted to give it was that the PhDs in question were not medical and so their high prevalence shouldn't carry the weight used in the interpretations they're opposing. This is not something they can claim simply by excluding those currently engaged as professional doctors. No epidemiologists, nor many virologists, for example, would fall into that category.

Note also that the steady level of the PhD result was commented on; much the same for the duration fo the study, unlike the other levels — Banno

I see it was commented on in the paper, I was referring to the later comments. The article is an attempt to say that some interpretations of their study regarding the levels of hesitancy among PhDs were misleading and in it they say that hesitancy drops overall. I'm just saying that that comment itself is misleading in an article about hesitancy among PhDs (the only group for whom hesitancy did not drop), but I'd be happy to put that down to nothing more than the casual nature of the article (it's only an interview, not a paper)

I don't see that anything can be concluded safely. — Banno

Yes, I agree, but some things can be called into reasonable doubt. There is reasonable doubt that vaccine hesitancy can be ameliorated by education alone. That's important for policy-makers, who don't have the luxury of waiting for the full weight of multiple repeated studies.

So you misrepresent me in retaliation. Ridiculous as usual. — frank

Odd. It was @Isaac, not you, whom I had taken to be thinking King was rejecting the data; the conversation was following on from my previous reply to him, here where he said:

The authors now seems to think a mass conspiracy of fraudulent responses was to blame, possible with the numbers. — Isaac

I've said nothing much to you; a policy I plan to continue.

To avoid any of that confusion, the authors could have just verified the data. — frank

That's a lot of verification. There'd have to have been a concomitant reduction in sample size, which may have been a trade-off they weren't willing to make in a scoping experiment.

That's a lot of verification. There'd have to have been a concomitant reduction in sample size, which may have been a trade-off they weren't willing to make in a scoping experiment. — Isaac

Wouldn't you prefer good data to a large sample size? It's Facebook. It's a wacky domain to begin with.

There is reasonable doubt that vaccine hesitancy can be ameliorated by education alone. — Isaac

Oooo, that'd be pushing it. We might agree that there is at least something here that is worth a second look. The data for those with masters qualifications or less represents the bulk of the population, after all; and the relation between education and hesitancy is undeniable in that group.

I think that's about all that we can conclude.

A scoping study often sacrifices quality of data for sample size. The idea is just to see if there's anything interesting to investigate, a good hypothesis can then be constructed which better quality data can confirm or reject. I'd say this exercise certainly brought up something interesting to investigate, but in the current political climate, that ain't gonna happen.

Oooo, that'd be pushing it. We might agree that there is at least something here that is worth a second look. The data for those with masters qualifications or less represents the bulk of the population, after all; and the relation between education and hesitancy is undeniable in that group. — Banno

Yes, you're right. Of course, the 'education' being thought of in the 'education ameliorates vaccine hesitancy' argument is not really PhD level. Only on my second cup of tea this morning, not yet fully awake.

d say this exercise certainly brought up something interesting to investigate, but in the current political climate, that ain't gonna happen. — Isaac

There's nothing stopping them.

There's nothing stopping them. — frank

Really?

https://www.thelocal.se/20210219/swedish-officials-report-escalated-threats-and-hate-in-coronavirus-debate/

Only on my second cup of tea this morning — Isaac

Tea? There's your problem, right there...

I gather from the ambience hereabouts that I've walked back into a bit of a shitstorm. I'm not going to go back over the two hundred posts to see who said what, but I take it that there has been a bit of a pile-on with you at the bottom.

My comment here was not intended to be part of that. It was directed to @Prishon's apparent lack of erudition, which it now seems was a result of drugs and lack of sleep rather than a lack of knowledge. My apologies for causing offence.

So it goes. Perhaps I should change to tea.

Really? — Isaac

Just steer clear of Sweden. :lol:

Tea? There's your problem, right there... — Banno

Ha! I'm a semi-retired British academic...what can I do...there are laws about these things. They've only just rescinded the requirement to smoke a pipe. Elbow patches on tweed are still mandatory though.

I gather from the ambience hereabouts that I've walked back into a bit of a shitstorm. I'm not going to go back over the two hundred posts to see who said what, but I take it that there has been a bit of a pile-on with you at the bottom.

My comment here was not intended to be part of that. It was directed to Prishon's apparent lack of erudition, which it now seems was a result of drugs and lack of sleep rather than a lack of knowledge. My apologies for causing offence. — Banno

Thanks, I appreciate that. It did come at something of a bad time, not your fault.

Perhaps I should change to tea. — Banno

Yes, do. I have a couple of spare tweed jackets going too if you want the full immersive experience.

which it now seems was a result of drugs and lack of sleep rather than a lack of knowledge. My apologies for causing offence. — Banno

Now where did you get THAT idea? My insomnia was caused by the ABSENCE of drugs. Havent found the Italics button yet.

Havent found the Italics button yet. — Prishon

...and to think @Banno was suggesting a lack of erudition...