>>>Both sides vilify. Both sides say the other is the ruin of the country. Nobody reaches out. Nobody shows respect.
>>>
>>
>>This both-sides-ism is one of the things that got the US to this place, the idea in the media that we should treat all ideas equally and that if we have someone talk about, say, the benefits of vaccines, we must balance that by then giving air to a vaccine denialist.
>>
>>There is truth in the world. Vaccines stop disease and have made our lives quantifiably longer. Vaccines do not cause autism. But there is a significant fraction of the American public who have chosen to reject reality and cocoon themselves into a world where they only hear what they want to hear. The American right has spent decades building an alternative media world where they reject reality and where they teach their followers that mainstream media (outlets that back up their stories with actual sources and do their best not to proliferate false stories) are not to be trusted, that they can only trust their own media. The result is that a significant number of Americans believe that there is no climate change, that vaccines cause autism, that Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya, and many other outlandish things.
>>
>>As I noted above, the mainstream media's response to being accused of being leftist has been too much both-sides-ism.
>
>I'll go a step further and point to 2 media tactics to lure audience in:
>1) creating false dichomoties / scale down the scale level
>In your examples only Obama being borne in Kenia is a clear yes/no decision, as "secret muslim" will be hard to (dis)prove and might resolve to multidimesional or cluster scaling.
>Measure temp changes, measure and count side effects of vaccines, measure and count results of mass vaccination (as is done in Israel) and do not frame into yes/no answers only. As strong immune system response is wanted, enhancers are added, which in turn also heighten side effects - which is good when seeing large numbers and if you compare effects with eagle eye view (granted, nearly impossible on brand new vaccines and vaccination method) and read up a bit on medicine and infection growth statistics, it is clear that your immune system will build immune response to Corona virus sooner or later if you live past 2025. Either via vaccination or meeting virus genes the traditional way. Forcing the discussion to the binary level of "there are no side effects" will only make it easy for anti-vaxxers to cite singular/anecdotal examples as "reason" not to vacc.

Maye this isn't an issue in Germany, but in this country, there is a strong movement of people who think all vaccines are bad and many of whom believe that the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine causes autism. (If you don't know the story behind the latter, search for Andrew Wakefield and stick only to legitimate news sites.) The result is that many parents are failing to get routine childhood vaccinations and diseases that were once rare in the US have returned. (For example, a couple of years ago, there was a major outbreak of measles.)

No one reputable is saying that vaccines have no side effects.

Tamar