Sam Harris, the famous atheist who has criticized Robert F. Kennedy for his crusade against vaccines, explained why he thought any blanket condemnation of vaccines could be dangerous.
Speaking on “Impact Theory” with host Tom Bilyeu, Harris prefaced his comments about vaccines by speaking of the efforts to bury the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop just prior to the 2020 election.
“My view is it is a coin toss as to what you do there,” he argued. “Now, if you raise the stakes, more, right, you make Trump even more sinister, you make the election even more tenuous, you make the information even more dubious, then the dials change. And so many of these decisions are not decisions you can make categorically in principle; it really is this pragmatic balancing of just what is true and what are the stakes,” he argued.
“You felt that it was obviously wrong to force people to get the MRNA vaccine for COVID, right?” he asked Bilyeu. “I would grant you, certainly in retrospect, that seems true, but if we change a few of the variables, I think your ethical intuitions and political intuitions would totally change.”
“You make it a much more obviously effective vaccine that really does block transmission, so like a sterilizing vaccine,” he theorized. “You make it a much more dangerous virus. You make it a virus that’s actually preferentially killing kids, rather than old people.”
“So now we’re in an environment where you’re deciding not to get vaccinated is putting my kids at risk. Do you get to make that choice? You might say, ‘Oh yes, I should be able to make that choice about my body,’ but dial up the deadliness of the pathogen, give us something like airborne Ebola that incubates for a month, you don’t know you have it and you walk around spreading it, and it’s got a 75% mortality rate and it’s mostly killing kids, no one gets to make that choice anymore. Literally, the cops come in and vaccinate you.”
“I would say that all of us agree to that,” he declared. “You turn up the lethality of the pathogen; you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine; you turn down the risk of the vaccine, give me a truly safe vaccine, where there’s not even one documented case of vaccine injury, right?”
“Then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that kind of environment,” he asserted. “Then it’s just a no-brainer. Then we just don’t tolerate diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It’s a full-on emergency. Bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks. There’s so many of them we don’t know what to do with them; we’ve got these mobile morgues and we have a vaccine that actually works?”
“Then we’ve got RFK Jr. saying, ‘Maybe we don’t want to get the vaccine’ on Rogan’s podcast, right? That’s the world I’ve been worried about ever since COVID,” he stated.
“If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID, at a rate of whatever it was, 1% today, but it was pretty much all kids, we would have had a very different experience,” he told John Wood in January. “There would have been no f***ing patience for vaccine skepticism.”