Welcome to day 7 of discworld's community-built alignment chart!
The results are in, and the community's choice for Social Good is Lady Sybil Vimes (née Ramkin)! This was by far the closest-fought poll so far, with there only being about a 20 vote difference between Sybil and Carrot, who tragically comes second again. Poor lad.
Every day, this chart will be filled in with a discworld character determined by the comment with the most upvotes after 24 hours. This will continue until we have built a complete chart.
Todays alignment is: Social Moral. For reference, this is for characters that have a strong lean towards both Goodness and Lawfulness, but aren't quite as Good or as Lawful as others. They still value them highly, just to a lesser extent than the extremes. Think of them a little like "Lawful Good lite".
Which discworld character do you think best fits into this alignment? Write a comment arguing your case or upvote any you agree with.
Reminder that the non-standard categories of Moral, Impure, Social, and Rebel are, in essence, acting as stepping stones between Neutral and their respective extremes. For example, Moral characters are characters that have more "good-ness" than Neutral characters do, but not as much as a Good character would - they're sort of a halfway point. Think of them like shades of grey, or, if you prefer, whites that have got grubby.
If you need an outline of the traits each alignment exemplifies, check out this post.
See you tomorrow for day 8!

Bridging the Gap

The challenge in the fight on vaccines isn't the facts. It's getting people to listen.
https://preview.redd.it/wcl4621071zc1.png?width=596&format=png&auto=webp&s=f5c504be1c185e9c821e6c54967ae633729711a7

Roadblocks

One of the biggest challenges in Robert Kennedy Jr’s candidacy is overcoming the ‘anti-vaccine’ label. It’s weaker than it was years ago - Covid changed everything - but it’s still a barrier for a lot of people. And it’s not that they listen to his views and find them unreasonable. It’s just the way he’s been attached to the label, a conversation-ending smear so effective that people will reject him instantly and outright before he’s even had a chance to speak.
Many of the vaccine skeptical know exactly what it’s like - they were once on that side too. It’s as Guy describes above: almost all of us started off believing the institutional story, until something forced us to question it. Once people actually listen to what the other side has to say, opinions tend to change pretty quickly.
But there are a few major roadblocks preventing most people from ever beginning down that path, and I want to talk about them because they're how an official narrative as weak as the one on vaccines has been able to stand as long as it has.
One roadblock is the extreme (and engineered) stigma around the issue - the hate and derision you'll receive for questioning the consensus out loud; the social and even professional consequences you'll face. It's powerful enough for most to recoil at the faintest hint of deviation from the institutional line. It's almost a disgust reflex, and often comes with anger.
Another is the stake we naturally develop as participants. We don’t want to believe we’ve harmed ourselves and those we’re responsible for, and so there's a tendency to be too quick to accept the word of authorities who reassure us that we haven't.
Both of those have shifted significantly in recent years - the counterexamples have become too salient, too undeniable.
But there's still one impediment that is only in the early process of moving, and which continues to bar the way for many, holding the other roadblocks in place as well. It's that people simply can't imagine how our system - the system that they rely on in so many ways - could allow something like what is being claimed to take place.
People often need to understand the full scope of how something could happen before they can begin to process evidence that it is. And the implications of what the other side claims are just prima facie impossible to them, so they can't even begin to consider the evidence presented.
The system in theory works: experts in the field will call out bad science and behavior. Institutions aren't perfect but the incentives and mechanisms are in place for errors to be called out and needed improvements to be made. If the harms are real, why wouldn't the experts speak out? What motivation could they possibly have to do something like this and cover it up? And how could they possibly pull it off with so many who surely don't share the motive watching?
https://preview.redd.it/8kwgsyyl41zc1.png?width=679&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f05ad3d43724dffc5cc8419d44d2cd90da4c1fe
The intuitive conviction is that something like significant vaccine injury simply couldn't go undetected and unaddressed. The system would never allow it. And unfortunately what it usually takes is a personal experience with the failures of the system to start seeing that the way the system works in theory is not the way it works in practice - often an injury to oneself or a loved one.
(I'm very sympathetic to those who still take the default position for this reason - I wouldn't know either if I hadn't had my own set of experiences exposing me to the holes in the institutional story.)
If such an experience happens to you, you'll be gaslit about it if you bring it to anyone's attention, just a coincidence, and some continue to fall for it. But for many that intuitive conviction is broken. Their stance begins to open a little bit. In spite of all of the once-persuasive programming, it becomes undeniable that something is clearly wrong here. And at that point you can start to really take in the evidence.
You start to see some things that really shift your intuitions. Some were things you probably saw before, but you waved them off then - marginal issues, but the system still mostly works. The experts know what they’re doing; who were you to disagree? But now these discrepancies are forcing you ask questions, and they begin to pile up.
You see example after example of corruption and incompetence in public health and the pharma industry - the number of medications recalled, the fines for fraud and unethical business practices, the way the research process has been fundamentally corrupted, the bad incentives and conflicts of interest present all throughout the industry and its regulatory bodies, the way the institution protects itself at the expense of the public it serves.
https://preview.redd.it/gz9ciljo41zc1.png?width=544&format=png&auto=webp&s=5621a1d67e2b3a7e3dd1498add8e0a97dd0c84cb
You see massive failures in other once highly-respected institutions and organizations - sometimes amounting to plain evil. You start to wonder if medicine and public health are so different, if they are so immune to the problems that plague every other institution.
You see the way whistleblowers and dissidents lose their livelihoods and reputations through targeted character assassination campaigns, and wonder if there aren't many more who are reluctant to speak out in face of such heavy consequences.
Then maybe you start actually looking into what the anti-vaccine loonies have been saying.

Narrative and Reality

It happened for me. I went to a chiropractor's office once many years ago and remember shaking my head in disbelief seeing the Vaccines Revealed series on display on the check out desk. It was a feeling of second-hand embarrassment and sharp judgment - don't you know all of that's been debunked? I didn't actually even know the claims made in the series or anything else about it - I just knew that everyone knows it's BS.
But eventually, I'm not sure exactly what prompted it, I watched some of the interviews. Maybe it was like this - I'd been confidently wrong before.
So I listened... and what I heard actually made sense. It wasn't what I was expecting, the tired and easily dispatched arguments I was sure would be presented. These were intelligent and knowledgeable people, often experienced doctors and nurses, once fully behind the program, but sacrificing their careers and the esteem of their peers to speak out about what they had come to see as a terrible injustice.
(Robert Kennedy Jr was one of those interviewed, and I remember I had a skepticism of him when I first saw him even though I didn't know anything about him; this strange closed stance I found myself taking even though I couldn't place or understand why exactly I took it. I must have absorbed it through all the negative coverage he received... He's become one of my greatest heroes in the time since.)
What I found is that these people on the other side generally seemed more knowledgeable, often a lot more, in the rare instances where engagement between the two sides was allowed. [1][2][3]
And I looked deeper and deeper. I wasn't sure about my ability to parse every claim, but when I'd read the rebuttals from the leading vaccine-proponents like Paul Offit or Peter Hotez, they just wouldn't even be in touch with what the opposition was saying. Often there would be major gaps in logic and other errors, but they were dismissive and certain enough in the presentation that nobody would have the confidence to call them out on it.
They seemed to be relying on the perception of authority and the stigma they'd created to intimidate observers out of actually thinking through the relevant issues.
They were hiding something - that much was clear to me.
And there's this idea of 'The Noble Lie' that the anti-vax side will often talk about. The gist is that the pro-vax side knows that there are merits to what the opposition is saying, but believe that they can't allow the public to know. Vaccines are too good, too important to allow debate to happen on the topic.
There's a section from the June 1984 Federal Register that seems to confirm this:

However, although the continued availability of the vaccine may not be in immediate jeopardy, any possible doubts, whether or not well founded*, about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need to assure that the vaccine will continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with the nation’s public health objectives.*

And there’s more recent confirmation too -
https://reddit.com/link/1cmg7nz/video/es72g2ay41zc1/player
But here's the problem: they don't actually know the risk-benefit profile. They've never done the needed studies - long term data, true placebo controls, cumulative impact - though they'll lie to you about it.
They seem to just believe that given that there's so great a benefit, and the risk of injury seems so marginal, how could they ever let the program get called into question? How could they potentially let the progress against terrible, vaccine-preventable diseases be reversed?
Their own statements indicate it. This was what they said after they realized that infants were being exposed to levels of mercury far exceeding the federal guidelines:

The recognition that some children could be exposed to a cumulative level of mercury over the first six months of life that exceeds one of the federal guidelines on methyl mercury now requires a weighing of two different types of risks when vaccinating infants. On the one hand, there is the known serious risk of diseases and deaths caused by failure to immunize our infants against vaccine-preventable infectious diseases; on the other, there is the unknown and probably much smaller risk, if any, of neuro-developmental effects posed by exposure to thimerosal. The large risks of not vaccinating children far outweigh the unknown and probably much smaller risk, if any, of cumulative exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines over the first six months of life.
Joint Statement of The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service (FDA & CDC), July 7, 1999

Wanting to maintain public confidence in the program is the most charitable explanation for their deception, and I think it is the main force, though I think there are less charitable explanations that factor in too.
But even good intentions are no guarantee of a positive outcome. And people should expect problems to metastasize in precisely the areas where institutions have insulated themselves from scrutiny.
We’ve seen what happens when our leaders stifle dissent in service of the ‘greater good’:
https://preview.redd.it/sphry75551zc1.png?width=1456&format=png&auto=webp&s=6786f358f2b136c392aab4c4edf4376afb4767fa
But before going into the risks of vaccines, understand that even the purported benefits should be called into question.
There's the widely quoted Guyer study -

The major declines in child mortality that occurred in the first third of the 20th century have been attributable to a combination of improved socioeconomic conditions in this country and the public health strategies to protect the health of Americans. [...] Vaccination, while first used in the 18th century, became more widely implemented in the middle part of the century. Vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis became available during the late 1920s but only widely used in routine pediatric practice after World War II. Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.

The book Dissolving Illusions also goes into this history and how the gains that have been attributed to vaccines have to be scrutinized, and that many of them owe to improvements in sanitation and nutrition.
I won't try to make the full case here, but the thing to understand is that there is systematic pressure to inflate perception of vaccine effectiveness at every turn going back decades and decades, and every single assumption and measurement has to be questioned because you can be damn sure it is not happening within the institutions.
From a study from 2005, before these processes of capture and suppression had achieved complete control and keen observers could still point out what was happening:
https://preview.redd.it/qs5fchm851zc1.png?width=679&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca97d5b548b8269b1a9341809676fc7973aca3ad
And there's more, but that's all you need for a 'how'. Science is a human enterprise, subject to all of the human biases and failings that lead to massive errors in other domains. Groupthink, greed, self-protection, incompetence - public health and medicine are not somehow immune to them. If this was ever in doubt, it became clear to many during the COVID response.
Now as for the risks.
The number of mothers who know that their child was injured by vaccines - perfectly fine before, and then suddenly symptomatic, falling behind on milestones just after a 'wellness' visit - should tell you something.
The billions that have been paid out through the extremely arduous vaccine injury compensation program, which only a small fraction of vaccine injury parents can see through to completion, should tell you something.
The dramatic increases in autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders we've seen over the last few decades, coincident with a dramatic increase in the vaccine schedule), should tell you something.
It's not increased rates of diagnosis, as much as they want you to believe it:
https://preview.redd.it/8f3xfd2e51zc1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=661d21d4338650ab7bc16667dab9233e540b71c4
I've always liked this quote -

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.
Jeff Bezos

And it's not exactly crazy to think that injecting, e.g., aluminum and mercury into babies could have some negative health consequences. Given the plausibility of the mechanism, the anecdotes should carry even more weight.
But shouldn't any claims from anecdotes bear out in the data? [4] Yeah, the system should work in theory. But the reality is a different story -
The whistleblower was senior CDC scientist Dr. William Thompson
Slate received so much pushback for publishing this article that they had to publish a letter from the editor defending the decision - I subscribed based on their courage
https://reddit.com/link/1cmg7nz/video/x4ljagtq51zc1/player

Getting to the Truth

I won’t try to make a full case here - there is just too much.
But I’m not hoping to convince you that vaccines are unsafe or ineffective. I just want to give enough for anyone willing to listen to realize there's something going on here; that these agencies need an absolute overhaul, and that there needs to be a full investigation into what's taken place here with accountability for everyone involved.
Experts and institutions aren’t infallible; they need to be pushed back on and scrutinized.
When they are, long held consensus can often change:
This happened only after an arduous fight with the FDA
[1] - RFK Jr discussing vaccine safety with a family physician in his NewsNation town hall (2023)
[2] - JB Handley on The Doctors (2009)
[3] - Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy on Larry King (2009)
[4] - In the rare event a genuine comparison is made, some studies have found rather concerning results - but the findings are ignored and the researchers ridiculed for giving fodder to anti-vaxxers

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It finally happened! I am SO happy. My case is a bit different than what I have seen from here, I believe. My AP (I-131) got approved after expediting (approved for 5 years too!), but I never got my card on the mail. I don't know what happened, but after a month and a half it just never showed up, so I called USCIS and I made an appointment to get at least an emergency travel parole to be able to see a very sick family member (had evidence for this).
When I arrived at my appointment and explained the situation, the officer (who was super nice, by the way) understood and started looking at my case. He took over an hour and was constantly asking questions about everything: my marriage (we've been together for over 8 years, so we have tools of evidence of marriage), my career (have supporting documents/letters of recommendation for my career), etc. to my absolute surprise at the end of the hour he said 'congratulations, your I have approved your I-485!'. I literally cried lol I wasn't expecting it at all! We have so much evidence of our time together (legal documents, insurances, leases, pictures with friends and family going back 8 years and a half, you name it) that I guess it was enough to do this. It had also been a year so it was time to get an update on my case. Super happy and thankful! Moral of the story: reach out to USCIS if something is wrong! To my surprise the officer was very nice and understanding of my situation.