The Core

There are so many polls out there now. It used to be it was Gallup and Pew and a couple others. If you were interested, you knew their basic methodology and you didn't have to worry about whether their poll included cell phones (as they didn't exist). They skewed rich and elderly because poor people didn't have phones and everyone except the elderly hung up on them. But they had methods to balance that.

Now a poll could be an online survey of 233 users of Breitbart or Mother Jones. So that tells you about the beliefs of users of those sites, which you probably know already without doing a poll. Plus some places (Sinclair Media, for example), have really dialed in push polling to get the answers they want.

So now you really need to know the source, who's behind the poll, what methodology they used, what the actual questions and possible answers are.

I think this is a good thing in the sense that polls have always had their faults, but people thought about it less. It's a bad thing in that most people are not equipped with a basic knowledge of stats so they can't actually evaluate a poll even given a lot of info, so they just disbelieve the ones they disagree with.

My new plan for getting more people interested in taking the vaccine is as follows: plant the story among Sinclair execs that the anti-vax groups are all being funded by George Soros in a nefarious plan to discourage Trump supporters from taking the vaccine with the goal of killing off as many as possible before the next election. Let Sinclair execs force local stations to run the story and then sit back and wait until all the Sinclair viewers start demanding that Trump supporters get equal access to the vaccine. Soon there will be demonstrations in the street, complete with AR-15s.

The part I haven't worked out is how to prevent them from storming vaccine clinics.

This, by the way, is inspired by joke doing the rounds in France and reported in Le Monde. France has some of the lowest interest in vaccination in the world, with only 42% of French people saying they would take the vaccine as of Christmas (now up to 54% as it rolls out).

The joke is that a doctor is trying to vaccinate four skeptics, a Brit, a German, an American and a Frenchman.

The Brit says, "Well, I don't really trust it, but I must be a gentleman," and he gets the shot.
The German says, "Well, I don't really trust it, but the authorities say I must," and he gets the shot.
The American says, "Well, I don't really trust it, but my neighbors are all insane pro-vaccine people who will give me endless crap if I refuse," and he gets the shot.

The Frenchman won't budge. He says, "I don't care what they do. I'm not getting it."

The doctor says, "Well, it doesn't really matter. French people aren't allowed to get the vaccine anyway," at which point the French jumps up and screams, "I DEMAND THAT I BE VACCINATED IMMEDIATELY."