The core anti-vax argument is "nature is better"
The logic behind anti-vaccination reflects humanity's deep bias in favor of nature
Note: This essay was cross-posted from the subreddit /r/natureisterrible, a community for those who believe that nature is not good. I wrote it upon the occasion of receiving my second Pfizer dose, after being disgruntled that vaccination rates are falling well below expectations.
All vaccines have some side effects, and yes, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease itself. But in the case of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine is a necessary and almost certainly very safe way of ending this humanitarian and economic crisis.
Here in the United States, governmental organizations are now projecting that we are unlikely to achieve herd immunity. Although we have far more vaccine capacity than we need, a group of vaccine hesitant people stand in the way of ending the virus right in its tracks, pointlessly causing numerous more deaths.
Now, to be clear, I understand the desire not to want to inject one's body with a foreign substance that one has had no prior experience with. For most Americans, however, this desire represents a false choice. The choice is not whether to take a foreign substance, but when and which one to take. In other words, you can either take the COVID-19 vaccine, or you can risk getting infected with the virus, as you probably will be, sooner or later. There is little you can do to escape the real choice, besides confining yourself to social isolation forever.
A cursory glance over the comment sections on various social media platforms will reveal the primary anti-vaccine argument, which generally varies little between its speakers. Its main premise is to mistake this false choice for a real choice, and thereby to prefer the natural risk of the virus to the artificial risks from the vaccine. The core of this argument is essentially just the pro-nature bias, the scourge of human reasoning from which /r/natureisterrible was formed. And just as usual for the pro-nature bias, it is completely unfounded as an ethical yardstick.
A popular tactic of anti-vaxers is to point out the relatively low rate of death among those who are infected with COVID-19, especially among young and healthy people. Now of course, even taking this argument for granted, being young and healthy doesn't prevent you from infecting other people with the virus. Put another way, this argument, even if it worked, could only justify a selfish course of action. But putting the selfishness objection aside, the argument still fails: the vaccine has a far lower rate of death than COVID-19 natively.
Another common argument fails for the same reason. People say that the vaccine hasn't been tested long-term. You know what also hasn't been tested long-term? The virus.
If we actually evaluated natural and artificial risks the same way, we would often find that we are putting too much faith in nature, and not enough trust in humans. Humanity seems forever plagued to make this same mistake, over and over again. And it is a mistake, because at the end of the day — after all the careful argumentation and statistics — a simple fact remains. Artificial things have a simple reason for being good: someone designed them, and people generally have good intentions. No one designed nature, and thus we can assume that nature is terrible. This is the bias you'd adopt if you really wanted to be safe.