UnHerd Interview Confusion
Jerry Coyne shows, correctly, that Freddie Sayers repeatedly tried to get me to say something he wanted me to say, namely that religion is good for human welfare. That was his privilege as the interviewer. But he went too far when, in a tweet announcing the interview, he mendaciously said that I did admit that religion was good for human welfare. That can only be called clickbait, and crude clickbait at that. Unfortunately, it worked for about half of the audience who posted replies. The other half saw through it. What I did say was that EVEN IF religious belief benefits human welfare, that doesn’t make it true. And the truth is what I care about.
One thing I was not prepared for was the sheer number of virulent vaccine deniers among Sayers' followers. There is no doubt that vaccination against covid saved many lives, and the development of vaccines in an astonishingly short time was a major triumph of science. What is less certain is the claim, which I earlier believed, that covid vaccination refusal is an antisocial act, as it definitely is for some other vaccines such as MMR.
Richard Dawkins
You start your post saying that truth is all you care about.
Then you say "There is no doubt that vaccination against covid saved many lives, and the development of vaccines in an astonishingly short time was a major triumph of science."
There is in fact a 'doubt' and to say there is 'no doubt' is bordering on religious belief (in the new religion of science). Using good old fashioned regular science, there are still questions to be answered as to how many lives the covid vaccine saved. The development of the vaccines also wasn't done in the astonishingly short time you think. The majority of the work was done over the last 10-20 years.
You may call me an anti-vaxxer for questioning the vaccines but that is the whole point of science, to keep questioning it. So by using the words 'no doubt', it sounds very anti-science to me.
While you may be confident that "there is no doubt that vaccination against covid saved many lives" we have had a lot of trouble finding clean data to support this. Excess mortality data does not seem to support this and most other data registries are so full of systemic bias they are hard to interpret, such as the "14 day grace period" aka the Bayesisn datacrime. Add to that the difficulty getting health agencies to release information with vaccine status identified. Certainly in younger age groups the evidence seems to suggest the cost outweighed the benefits. Not surprising given this group was very unlikely to die from COVID; even a modest increase in myocarditis deaths was unlikely to be unmatched.