Citing Twitter posts or Wikipaedia items as ‘evidence’ isn’t likely to taken as a serious argument, it’s like Trump supporters who say he must have won because I saw lots of pro-Trump signs in peoples’ gardens.
I’m a doctor of philosophy not medicine, so although I’m not very experienced in saving lives, I do know how to construct a sound argument, whereas most anti-vaxers choose semi-random social media info-bits that reinforce their fears and prejudices and then collage these together into something that reinforces their pre-existing world view.
I started this thread by contrasting two governments’ differing approaches to compiling their countries’ respective death tolls, but even though different countries apply differing criteria, looking at annual average death tolls around the world is informative. So, for instance even though Russia’s official COVID death toll is comparatively low, since the outbreak of the pandemic the official count of annual deaths has increased considerably over previous years. It would seem therefore that even in countries where there is a tight control over the media, other sources of official information can inadvertently(?) sidestep this.
I’m not providing a link because I don’t want to be accused of directing people to my sources – search for it yourself if it’s important to verify
However, I find this statistical phenomenon far more interesting than the boring vax / anti-vax debate because it demonstrates the inability of totalitarian regimes to adequately control even all their official sources of information.
Would be interested to read Geof Cox on the above