Shock Poll: PhDs Are Most “Vaccine Hesitant”

The Daily Mail reports that a survey of five million Americans regarding public attitudes about Covid-19 vaccination has turned up a “surprising” (i.e., inconvenient and soon-to-be-buried) result: When the population is sorted by education level, the highest degree of “vaccine hesitancy” is found not among the mainstream media’s favorite whipping boys, knuckle-dragging illiterates — aka “Trump voters” — but rather among those with the highest education level.

The study was conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, and the relevant finding is summarized as follows:

The report showed a surprising U-shaped correlation between willingness to get a Covid vaccine and education level – with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated. 

Of those surveyed, 20.8 per cent with a high school education were reluctant to get the shot, and 23.9 per cent with a PhD were against it. 

Furthermore, while “hesitancy” among those with the lowest education level was found to have shrunk over the first several months of 2021, “hesitancy” among those with the highest held steady. 

‘Those with PhDs were the only education groups without a decrease in hesitancy,’ the paper read.

Hmm.

Since this result does not surprise me the way it apparently does the researchers and reporters, perhaps I might take a moment here to propose some relatively obvious common sense explanations for this high level of unwavering vaccine skepticism or reservation — “hesitancy” is a loaded term, suggesting irrational timidity — among Americans with PhDs.

First, the category of PhDs, even in today’s dilapidated education environment, will naturally include a higher proportion of individuals of high intelligence than other segments of the population.

Second, PhDs are people who almost by definition have chosen to devote an unusually large portion of their lives, and a disproportionately high degree of their energies, to studying and producing logical arguments, learning to recognize weak reasoning, and researching historical precedents.

Third, PhDs, having invested so much time and energy, and often their livelihoods and daily endeavors, in their capacity for independent thought, are more likely, on average, to feel a natural resistance to being browbeaten with poorly reasoned “certainties” from authorities and mainstream mouthpieces.

Fourth, PhDs are the only segment of any population (as sorted by education level) all of whose members have training and experience in conducting professional-level research and producing detailed research results within their respective fields, which means they all have training and experience in doing the same kind of work that the vaccine researchers and the Dr. Faucis have done — for which reason they are far less susceptible to the logical fallacy of appeal to authority (aka argument from experts) which has been used to smother debate about every aspect of this pandemic from day one.

Fifth, PhDs are naturally less likely to be wowed, humbled, or reassured by the mere fact that the person pitching the official line on CNN has a PhD after his name, since they themselves have spent years of their lives surrounded by PhDs, and therefore understand all too well how fallibly human all doctorate holders really are.

These reasons, taken together, would presumably explain why even the consistency and uniformity of the officially sanctioned expert opinion and public statements on vaccination, which would be expected (and are intended) to gradually wear down public skepticism, have failed to have this effect on only one group, the PhDs. That is, as the survey showed, even the second-most “hesitant” group, those with only high school education, have become more compliant with the party line over the months since the vaccines became available to Americans, whereas PhDs continued to show skepticism at the same very high rate — almost one quarter — even through the months when other education groups were being broken down by the incessant propaganda. 

So let’s summarize our not-so-surprising results, then, by way of a brief overview of what they indicate.

Those Americans who, as a group, are publicly recognized as the most intellectually capable; who live their lives most fully in the realm of ideas and theories; who have the most personal experience conducting high-level independent research themselves, using principles, context, and precedents to reach logical conclusions; who are prone, by training and practice, to view new information within a wider context and against precedent, and to maintain a healthy skepticism about all claims of “new knowledge”; and who most highly value their independent minds, and are therefore constitutionally least likely to bow before the claims of government experts — those most highly intelligent, educated, and research-oriented Americans, it seems, are holding out longer against the calls to immediate and “unhesitant” universal vaccination than any other group, in very substantial numbers.

This does not prove that those 23.9 percent of PhDs are right to be skeptical or reserved, or that their specific doubts will ultimately be proved correct. But their reservations, given their backgrounds, serve to blow one more gaping hole in the wall of official propaganda, which affirms that a bunch of backwater conspiracy-immersed haters are the only thing standing in the way of “the eradication of Covid-19.” 

Most conveniently, the Daily Mail report informs us that:

The researchers did not offer an explanation as to why so many people with PhDs were vaccine hesitant, and the paper noted that ‘further investigation into hesitancy among those with a PhD is warranted’. 

To put it mildly, I suspect that the powers that be in the worlds of peer review and government will not be pressing for “further investigation” into the independent-minded PhDs’ reasons anytime soon — those powers having long since determined that dissenting opinion is neither desirable nor admissible. Unless by “further investigation” we mean university officials and/or government agents visiting them personally with a new questionnaire, along these lines:

  1. Do you really want millions of people to die?
  2. Why are you still irrationally frightened of a vaccine that everyone knows is perfectly safe and almost one hundred percent effective against Covid-19?
  3. Don’t you care about your fellow human beings enough to do the right thing?

To carry that thought one step further, perhaps, though I am not an American, I might offer my own sample answers to that prospective “investigation”:

  1. It is not a question of wanting people to die; as it happens, I know for a fact that every human being currently living on this planet is going to die, and there is nothing that either I or any tyrant or medical expert anywhere can do to prevent it.
  2. The vaccine as such is not primarily what I find frightening. What is somewhat frightening, though quite rationally so I would say, are the totalitarian means being employed to force this still-experimental medication on the entire population, including the vast sectors of the younger population that are at a statistically insignificant risk from the virus this vaccine is intended to prevent (though it does not actually prevent it) — apparently without even giving credence to the possibility of long-term harm that might result from such widespread use of a powerful drug that is by necessity insufficiently tested.
  3. As for the tiny handful of “fellow human beings” I know and care about personally, I am more than willing to do what seems best for them, without hesitation. However, regarding the great mass of sheep who are passed off as my “fellow human beings” today, and who, collectively, have more than amply demonstrated that there is nothing they would not deprive me of in the name of following their masters and ameliorating their propaganda-induced fears…well, the jury is still out on what I would be willing to do for them.

You may also like...