Belief without Verification or Certainty

[Angrboda]

Yes, the right balance is tricky. Faith only in the fully tested is not reasonable. Faith in what one reads on Facebook is not warranted. 

Anti-vaxxers and such people are frustrating, but if we take a step back, I think we can have some sympathy. They have reached wrong conclusions, but not all of their arguments are insane. The government really does lie constantly, and has lied about Covid all along. Pharmaceutical companies really do only care about money, and don't give a hang if we live or die. Parsing just exactly which lies are important to see through becomes a difficult project. In a sense, the anti-vaxxers have overdone the skepticism -- they think that there is too much faith in the unproven. The vaccines really were developed quickly, and I remember when Kamala Harris said she would never trust a vaccine developed by the Trump administration. Then as soon as the President changed the same vaccines became trustworthy. The anti-vaxxers merely disbelieve in one more god than you and I do (figuratively speaking). 

I think it's easy to come up with a kind of "idealized" anti-vaxxer when being charitable. One who has weighed all presented arguments carefully, and (at the end of the day) still has some nagging doubts about the vaccines. But in practice, what's largely going on with these folks is that they apply an insurmountable (and some may suggest, undeserved) measure of scrutiny to the scientific community. But THEN, to the theories which suggest some spooky ulterior motive, where the powers that be are attempting to poison us en masse... they let that claim pass without sufficient scrutiny... and nowhere near the scrutiny they gave scientific claims.

That's not skepticism, that's sloppy, extremely biased thinking. I would welcome these folks becoming genuine skeptics. It wouldn't bother me so much if they were ultimately unconvinced about vaccines if they could, at the very least, articulate how utterly weak the conspiracy claims are.

Except that we're all biased in that way, we read sources that agree with our preconceptions with less skepticism than we do sources that disagree. I don't think twice about believing a story in the Washington Post or on CBS News, but apply a much greater degree of scrutiny to stories from National Review or Fox News. It isn't sloppiness per see, it's just the way that we are built.