"Debate me" bros in the age of COVID-19 disinformation: Quacks, science deniers, and conspiracy theorists love to challenge doctors, scientists, and science communicators to “live public debates” over
"Debate me" bros in the age of COVID-19 disinformation: Quacks, science deniers, and conspiracy theorists love to challenge doctors, scientists, and science communicators to “live public debates” over
Science deniers and conspiracy theorists love to challenge real experts and science communicators to “live public debates.” Just say no.
I have posted this here for its particular relevance to the current awfulness of a plethora of far right crackpots bullying a vaccine scientist in an attempt to force him into a farce of a debate.
The nearest analogy I can come up with is putting a researcher in a room with a monkey. Then, tell the researcher that to win, he has to convince the monkey of his research. Then, tell the monkey that to win it has to completely smear the researcher with fecal matter.
These farcical calls for debate are a sham, designed only to keep quacks, cranks, and charlatans in the spotlight, to continue to give them a platform with which to spread their brand of snake oil. While rigorous debate can be an useful tool to find truth and meaning, it has its limits. For a debate to be a tool of truth, it requires at a bare minimum that the parties involved are acting in good faith, and that both parties share a common ground in that they have a healthy respect for empirical truth. RFK Jr. has neither good faith or an interest in truth. He just wants more opportunity to spread his metaphysical cancer to more, to convince people to willingly forego their faculties of logic and reason.
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I think misinformation should be countered on merit of science. Something like Dr Prasad presented is the best way to arrive at an agreement that he is misinformed. The issue is that RFK has a half truth. Yes, CDC suffers from regulatory capture, yes there are a few vaccine out there that have small amounts of ingredients that contain mercury, yes autism spectrum disorder has been on the rise according to CDC (but not because of vaccine!), and yes big pharma enjoys legal protection from "vaccine injuries". Does that warrent his level of vaccine scepticism? In my opinion it doesn't, but I don't think RFK is the audience that needs convincing. His viewers, and those that see the half truth and buy the argument need to be informed. Framing it as a debate sounds adversarial, but a joint effort to discover truth should resonate with everyone. Otherwise it just looks like we are avoiding the discovery of some inconvenient truth. I don't know why you say RFK is acting in bad faith or has no interest in truth, but it seems we could discover whether that is true or not too, so why not?