Zeynep Tufekci: belief

Transcript context

…But there are still inroads we make on people getting vaccinated. If it all relied on peers, it would be a kind of circularity. There must be some peers who start before the other peers do, and what convinces them? That’s what you should say to the person from Staten Island. Of course. You could say, “You could be first.” But I will not necessarily have a lot of authority. The peer networks — they don’t have to be your sibling. They’re heterogeneous. They just have to be somebody socially similar to you. That’s clearly one thing. The one argument that I make to people a lot — my most strong abstract argument that I think I can make is that you’re going to encounter this virus, either through infection or vaccination. There’s no not encountering this virus. I’ve written this so many times. You’re going to eventually encounter it. You either encounter it in its full form, where anything can happen, or you encounter what we have, which is just a spike, which will make you fine if you do encounter the full form. There’s no avoiding the virus. It’s just a question of, do you want to fight it with your hands tied or do you want the defenses? That’s all I can say to people to whom I have no other relationship to. From the iPad: are there situations where public health and transparency are in tension? And in those cases, should the public health authorities either lie to people or simply deliberately not tell them the full truth?…

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