On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 7:11 PM [email protected] <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Maybe the plan of having an anti-vaxer host is to try to appeal to the
> demo of stupid people who feel the show is too smugly smart.
>

There are a lot of intelligent and highly educated people who fall for
these types of things. It's confounding to decide they are all simply
stupid and the only people who listen to them are stupid. The one thing
that science communicators continually have trouble with is that a lot of
anti-vax and climate denier folks aren't suffering from a lack of data or
an inability to understand it. A lot of PhDs somehow got this bias that
makes them disbelieve the consensus.

If Mayim Bialik becomes Jeopardy host none of that changes. Nobody who is
having second thoughts about getting their child the MMR vaccine will make
a final decision based on who is hosting Jeopardy. As painful as it is, the
people who listen to her podcast and buy the stuff she fronts are not
troglodytes. They're educated and affluent. Some have had bad experiences
with the medical establishment and have just lost trust in its authority.
It wasn't anti-vaxxers who caused the opioid crisis. It was the mainstream
medical community. People are going to make strange and often bad decisions
about things like supplements and homeopathy no matter how much
counter-information is out there. Taking the host position away from Bialik
won't help or hurt that.

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