Sympathy for the Anti-Vaxxer

    I have an irrational fear of eating mushrooms. I've had it since I was a child. Don't know why, though I sort of suspect it might be from having read somewhere about it being dangerous to pick wild mushrooms because it's easy to pick a deadly poisonous one by mistake, and I thought, "Oh no! How do the mushroom farmers know they have the right ones?" Or it could just be that I tried them once as a child and really didn't like them, and never got over that.

    In any event, that childhood dislike and distrust of mushrooms has become an almost quasi-religious taboo. It isn't just that I don't want to eat mushrooms. It's that I feel if I were to eat one, even accidentally, I'd somehow violate the purity of my essence, or betray a deeply held principle, or something like that. There's no undoing the ingestion of a mushroom. I even find it difficult to bring myself to eat virtual mushroom stew in Minecraft. That's how powerful this purity superstition is.

    What would it take for me to overcome this phobia, and just try a mushroom? I dunno. People keep telling me I might find them delicious, and maybe I would, but that's not enough. I already have a whole lot of other foods I find delicious, and limited time on this planet to enjoy them, so adding yet another to that list doesn't seem like a huge benefit in the big picture. Besides, there are countless other delicious foods I'll never get to try, so what makes trying mushrooms take priority over them, especially when the obstacle to doing so is one that would take such an enormous amount of emotional effort to overcome? Is the reward of another food I might enjoy, even one that might be a new favorite, worth that ordeal?

    No, it would have to be something much more important than just finding a new favorite food. If you told me that I had to eat a plate of fried mushrooms to save my life or someone else's, that might do it, assuming you had a credible explanation for how these mushrooms would save me. But I'd need pretty good evidence, and even then I'd still find it really difficult.

    Fortunately, there aren't a lot of plausible scenarios in which anyone's life depends on my eating mushrooms. I'm not confronted with a difficult moral choice here: I can continue to abstain without fear of anything other than the occasional inconvenience for myself or others.

    And also fortunately, I know my mycophobia is irrational and foolish. I do not try (except in jest) to justify it with pseudoscientific rationales or conspiracy theories about Big Fungus trying to control us. And there isn't a thriving industry devoted to reinforcing and exploiting my phobia for financial and political gain.

    So antivaxxers, I do not envy you. If I had strong, convincing evidence that my eating a mushroom would save someone's life, I would really have a hard time of it. I'd be sorely tempted to clutch after any argument that might give me an excuse to doubt the evidence, to give me an excuse not to violate my mushroom-purity, or at least to delay it until I had proof (and delaying something indefinitely is an effective way to just never do it). 

    But here's the thing: there really is good, strong, convincing evidence that vaccines are an extremely powerful defense against disease, and that they are orders of magnitude safer than not being vaccinated. I know, you will provide link after link after link to articles and YouTube videos purporting to prove otherwise, but those links are just wrong. Every single one I've looked at has deep, fundamental flaws in methodology, employs embarrassing logical fallacies, or even straight up lies. Every single one. But when I point out these things, you just jump to another video or article or whatever that recycles mostly the same lies. It's exhausting. 

    So I do have some sympathy. I know how very difficult it is to try to overcome this purity superstition, and how much pride and honour you may have wrapped up in having kept yourself free of vaccines for so long, and how hard it is to give up that perfect score or end that winning streak. 

    I'm sitting here, struggling with offering to post a video of myself eating a mushroom to show that it can be done, to help give you the courage to overcome your vaccine phobia, but I honestly don't think I can do that. There are too many excuses. You might not believe I'm actually afraid of eating mushrooms. You might dismiss it as just a stunt. You might say to yourself, "Yeah, but vaccines really are dangerous, unlike mushrooms, so it's different." 

    And so I realize that it really isn't about getting you to take the vaccine. I have to respect that it's really really hard for you, as hard or harder than it would be for me to eat a mushroom. I can't ask you to do that. You have the right to bodily autonomy, and the right not to be vaccinated if you so choose. So that's not what I'm asking.

    Here's what I do ask, though, and I can ask this because it's something I can ask of myself. I have accepted that my fear of mushrooms is my problem, and nothing to do with mushrooms themselves. I don't seek pseudoscientific justifications for why I'm smart to avoid mushrooms, and I don't try to raise the alarm to alert other people to the dangers of a food that actually does them no harm and that they enjoy. I ask you to be honest with yourself, and accept that maybe your fear of vaccines might be the same kind of fear I have of mushrooms. Go ahead and do your own research, but do it properly: don't try to find stuff that validates your belief, try to find stuff that show you're wrong. 

    Heck, I'm not even asking you to acknowledge you're wrong. I just want you to acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong, and consider that if you're wrong, then promoting fear of vaccines just might be doing a whole lot of harm to people. I know it's a scary thought, especially in a pandemic where we're being told that the unvaccinated are suffering illness and death in such great numbers, to think you might bear some responsibility for that. But I'm urging you to have the courage to consider it seriously.