Still vexed by the unvaxed

For several days now, covid-19 vaccinations in the US have been going at over a million shots per day.  If that were to continue, the remaining unvaxed population would all get at least one shot each within less than three months.  Of course, it will not continue long at that rate.  Some fraction of the vaccine-skeptical population has wised up due to various factors -- the FDA Pfizer approval, the explosion of disease in the South and deep-red counties across the country, Trump's endorsement of vaccination at the Cullman rally (even though he was booed by those present) -- and is acting on its spasm of common sense.  But as any perusal of the wingnut net makes clear, the hard core -- probably the large majority -- of the determinedly unvaxed remain thus determined, continuing to play Russian roulette with natural selection.

(As an aside, Congress needs to pass emergency legislation mandating that the use of the word "jab" for covid-19 vaccination be punishable by 24 hours of sniffing the farts of diseased orangutans.  The practice is so out of control that bipartisan agreement on this should be attainable.)

You may feel baffled by the covidiots' rejection of scientific advice on the grounds, as they complain, that the advice keeps changing.  The problem lies in the difficulty the religious mind has in understanding how science works.

In a religion, truth takes the form of immutable pronouncements from on high, which never change.  If new evidence later surfaces which is incompatible with those pronouncements, so much the worse for the evidence.  For example, the fundies' dogma of Biblical inerrancy keeps them stuck at the level of ignorance attained by those who wrote the Bible thousands of years ago.  Life was created as-is in six days, despite new evidence establishing evolution.  Noah's flood really happened, despite being proven impossible by geology and genetics.  The Egyptian captivity, the exodus, and the empire of David and Solomon were real, despite archaeological evidence that they are mere myths.  Truth, once proclaimed, is forever fixed and unalterable.

The problem is that they expect science to work the same way.  But it does not.  Science is not a set of doctrines, but rather a system for deducing conclusions from evidence.  Inevitably, those conclusions will change as further evidence comes to light.  Relativity and quantum mechanics have refined the physics inherited from Newton.  The theory of evolution has itself evolved considerably from when Darwin first proposed it, due to the discovery of DNA, increased study of zoology and anatomy, etc.  With a new virus, as humans started off knowing only the basics and learned more about it over time (and as the virus itself mutated), it was inevitable that science's assessments and advice would change as understanding advanced.  But to the religious mind which doesn't grasp what science really is, such change seems suspect.

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Eye update:  The visual effects I've been suffering may be improving a little, though I'm not sure whether it's that or I'm just getting more used to them.  At least, so far, they are not getting worse, indicating that the condition is not proceeding to retinal detachment.  Still, the doctor said that if that happens, it could take several weeks, so I'm nowhere near out of the woods yet.  And the visual effects remain maddeningly distracting and irritating.

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Please help:  Hackwhackers blog has put together a list of places you can donate to help Afghan refugees.