The whole “I’ve never had a serious illness, so my immune system is strong” is just stupid.

Yes it is. Plenty of viruses and bacteria don't give a shit about your immune system. Never having a serious illness before won't protect you from HIV if you are promiscuous and not smart about it.

Vaccines also faced a problem in that they are too good. I'm 48. I don't remember any of my classmates getting measles or mumps. We did get chicken pox, though, because this was before the vaccine. My kids, meanwhile, haven't gotten chicken pox because they got the vaccine.

Given that I haven't experienced measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc first hand, it would be easy to dismiss their severity. "Measles are just some bumps on your body for a week. Whooping cough means you cough for a bit." Completely untrue, but the Internet can spread these reduced severity descriptions far and wide.

If people experienced actual measles or whooping cough regularly, they would be racing to get the vaccines. By removing these diseases from everyday life, vaccines actually hurt themselves by making it easier for people to dismiss the diseases.

I don't think this is a statistical issue.

When you boil down the rhetoric, what it comes down to is cognitive dissonance.

Anti-vaxers, and conservatives generally, have a negative physical reaction when they encounter a fact that goes contrary to their already established beliefs. Now to be fair, liberals do this too but not to the same extent.

There is a nugget of truth in their rhetoric which is that the government shouldn't be trusted. On that basis, an entire lie and, quite frankly a political party, has established itself as "the government wants to track you with the vaccine!" while completely ignoring their cell phones.

Many of these people don't want to know the truth because when presented with it, the truth will force them to either accept it or go back to what they know and, more importantly, feel.

This isn't a battle over math.

It's a battle over emotion and that's why it's so hard to win.

I don't think Math Illiteracy is the culprit in the case of well educated people, which I assume Maher is.

It is not hard to understand that vaccines have extremely low chance of serious side effects, while covid just has a low mortality chance, but a relatively high chance of long term effects. And these same vaccine deniers typically tout that covid is endemic now and "everyone is going to get it", so we can just mark likelihood to get it as near 100%.

It's not a hard concept. If you accept that you're oing to get covid one way or another, your net chance of serious harm is much lower if you take the vaccine.

But to these asshats, it's not about logic, it's about ego. His phrasing was extremely demeaning, and offered zero evidence to his point of view. It was simply "if you don't agree with me, you're an idiot". And that's the argument I tend to get from the antivaxxers, and if pressed for actual stats, they will claim some conspiracy to hide the true numbers, and at best, quote all these irrelevant tangential stats that some misinformation article claims indicates the mainstream science willfully ignores in their agenda to promote dangerous vaccines.