The anti-vaccination fallacy

Statement: “They say that vaccination against Covid-19 will bring the solution. It doesn’t, so I don’t want to take the jab.” Here “they” are the politicians, virologists and all others who urgently advice to have yourself vaccinated against Covid-19. In this blog I don’t want to discuss the question whether this vaccination really will bring the “solution” and will end the pandemic, but there are a few mistakes in the reasoning in Statement – a reasoning I often hear – and this gives me the opportunity to discuss again a few bad arguments and fallacies. Maybe there are more in it, and it’s up to you to discover them, but here I’ll discuss four such bad arguments.

Appeal to ridicule
Gregory L. Bock describes the appeal to ridicule fallacy in this way: “To ridicule a point of view is to disparage or make fun of it. When someone uses ridicule as part of an argument, she commits an appeal to ridicule, which is a fallacy of relevance”, so an attempt “to support a conclusion using an irrelevant premise.” Making fun of a premise doesn’t make this premise and so the whole reasoning false.
Indeed, that’s usually the context in which I hear this false reasoning: Making fun of and also talking down to those who promote vaccination. However, most politicians and virologists know that vaccination cannot make an end to Covid-19. The coronavirus will continuously change and new strains of the virus will develop, but vaccination will at least make the problem manageable by reducing the number of infections and making that vaccinated people become less seriously ill if they get Covid-19. But those who support Statement often have their own simple solutions to the pandemic and ignore that the problem is complicated. They just find it enough to ridicule politicians and virologists who incite people to take the jab. In this sense Statement is also an argumentum ad hominem (see here and here). (see Source, p. 118) 

Oversimplification
Implicitly I have discussed also another bad argument in the section above: the fallacy of oversimplification. This fallacy happens “when we attempt to make something appear simpler by ignoring certain relevant complexities”, so Dan Burnett (Source, p. 286). In Statement we see that politicians and virologists are said to see vaccination as the solution, while actually they see vaccination only as a part of the solution to end the pandemic. However, as Burnett ends his description of this fallacy: “When we obscure, ignore, or simply fail to identify certain factors, we run a high risk of misunderstanding reality.” Then “there’s a good chance our actions will – at best – be ineffective, or – at worst – exacerbate the very problem we are trying to solve.” (p. 288)

False dilemma
A false dilemma is reducing a complicated issue to excessively simple terms (see Source p, 346). Often it is reducing a problem to an either-or question. This makes it a kind of black-and-white thinking. In Statement it is either you see vaccination as “the solution” or you don’t take the jab. Nevertheless it can be reasonable to take the jab, although you don’t think that vaccination will bring an end to the pandemic. Being vaccinated will at least diminish the chance that you’ll become – seriously – ill for the time to come. Maybe you must be vaccinated later again, but taking the vaccination now is at least a temporarily solution; anyway for you, even if on a world-scale Covid-19 will not go away. Moreover, taking the jab is only one of the measures in the fight against the coronavirus. Keeping distance is another thing for example, like avoiding large parties, etc. 

Confusing levels
The idea that vaccination against Covid-19 will end the pandemic, as ascribed to politicians and virologists in Statement, is a claim that concerns the pandemic as a whole, but it doesn’t mean that there’ll still no longer be individuals who’ll get Covid-19. But by vaccinating the number of Covid patients will go down that much, so these experts say that we don’t need to speak of a pandemic anymore. Vaccination will make the problem manageable and make that the health services will not be overloaded any longer. This is a claim on national, regional or world-scale, but it is still quite well possible that a relatively small number of individuals will get Covid-19. In order to make that it will not be you who’ll get it, it is reasonable for you to take the jab. What’s true on a higher level (that most people will not become ill) doesn’t need to be true on a lower level (that you will not become ill). 

With the help of Statement I discussed four fallacies that are often heard in discussions. In some respects they overlap, as we could see in my explanations. Actually, at the same time Statement is an oversimplification, a false dilemma and a matter of confusing of levels, while also those who propagate anti-Covid vaccination are ridiculed. If right, together the fallacies discussed can be summarized in the context of the coronavirus pandemic as the “anti-vaccination fallacy”.
But maybe by using Statement as the starting point of this blog, I have ridiculed a substantial group of anti-vaxxers by oversimplifying what they think, by mistakenly saying that they maintain a false dilemma and by asserting that they confuse levels. Nevertheless some do. 

Source
Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.