PhD's are the most reluctant to get vaccinated in the US

They think they are smarter than everyone else. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that they DO have extensive education (in a narrow specialty). Somehow even less charming than MAGA antivax crowd.

No problem...I'm okay with them dying too.

This is odder still: "But the least skeptical of the shot had a Master's degree - with only 8.3 per cent of that group being vaccine hesitant."

So MAs are the least skeptical but PhD's are the most skeptical? This is really strange to me.

I'm guessing they don't have PhDs in epidemiology.

This is strange. My uncle is a medical doctor with a son who is immuno-compromised and he refuses to take the vaccine. He already has had it twice, and he is nearing 55.

I found out through a mutual friend that a Professor friend of ours refuses to take it. I just put it down to being a weirdo, which she is, but now I'm wondering if it's something more.

This DOES seem weird. All I have is personal experience. Mom has a Phd in chemistry, so not a ninny. Difficult person though. She did get the vaccines (my husband had to take her because she is old and pretending to be helpless). After second vaccine she became convinced that she had an injury. There is some kind of injury where they inject it into the wrong space in your arm. She is convinced she has it, and would probably be reluctant to get third vaccine. She is a massive hypochondriac and very suggestible too (like, if I have something wrong with me, she often comes down with the same thing). I have a Masters degree in something silly. I have no problem with the vaccine, but that is more due to having many prior health problems. I'm on meds that ruin my body but keep me alive. I just have to take them and keep on going. Maybe people with masters degrees are optimistic. We know there is more out there, but we've achieved a fair amount. Confident enough not to have to prove too much?

PhDs tend to exist in a narrow academic bubble and are just as prone as anyone to listen to nonsense outside of their field of study.

That and what R1 said.

Many people get a Masters to get ahead in their profession so they are the sort who tend to think on a more practical level.

The ones living in an academic bubble also believe that men can turn themselves into women by saying so... so they are definitely prone to magical thinking and other lunacy.

'Cause they's pointy headed piss ants!

My honest opinion, after having socialized with quite a few university professors over the years, is that a good 80% of them are completely and irrevocably nuts.

This sort of relate but sort of doesn't: I worked in retail for a long time. One thing that I am pretty good at is convincing people to open credit cards. That is a big deal in chain retail stores, the stores have goals. There was some profiling in it, I'm not going to lie. Most of this went on in my own head but I did have a handful of discussions about it. I would say that most recently, Asian men were fairly easy to convince. I would come at as a dumb bimbo. Just "shopping is fun!" attitude but would then tell them the money saving benefits too. My theory is that Asian men know that everyone thinks that they are smart, so they have nothing to prove there. They don't have to be all paranoid about getting talked into something. They understood that there can be financial perks to cards if you handle them correctly (on the funny side, I am personally terrible with credit cards). Just nothing to prove. I would say that white men where the most difficult, the most wary. Right away they'd say no. They don't want anyone to take them for a fool. It was bad when I was talking a woman into opening the card and her husband would walk up (unless he was Asian!). All women were kind of in the middle. They could be convinced if they were in the right mood.

I don't believe it. Surveys and polls always ask you to self-identify, and I think all the magat idiots like to pretend that they have advanced degrees to give credibility to their moronic ideas.

Sure, r13. I'm sure the Carnegie Mellon academics were easily taken in by that ruse.

[quote] all the magat idiots like to pretend that they have advanced degrees to give credibility to their moronic ideas.

Hilarious and so true. They love to act like they're privy to conspiracies and information that the rest of us who follow the 'lamestream media' are not in the know about. Hence, QAnon. I wouldn't be surprised if those idiots think they have a phD in conspiracy theories.

So, as in the "Only 27% of black New Yorkers are vaccinated" thread, you're going to assume that this research is nothing more than blatant misinformation imparted on behalf of a vast conspiratorial cabal whose intent is to distract us from the Trump anti-vaxxers?

Is that it, r14 and r15?

[quote] I'm sure the Carnegie Mellon academics were easily taken in by that ruse.

It's an online survey (notoriously unreliable) that 5,000,000 people responded to.

[quote] So, as in the "Only 27% of black New Yorkers are vaccinated" thread,

I don't know. I don't hang out on those racial threads like you seem to do, but my assumption would be that there is actual hard data about vaccination rates vs. some online survey.

The most famous Youtube PHDs who are vaccine skeptics are Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. They say that they want to take the vaccine, but only in 10 years or so after it has been thoroughly tested for possible long-term side effects.

Bret was a professor of biology and his wife is an evolutionary biologist. They recently made the Twitterverse very angry when it was discovered that other vaccine skeptics who had died of Covid had posted some of the Weinstein videos on Facebook and other places "warning" the public about the vaccines. Twitter said that these two PHDs had blood on their hands.

I won't post any of their videos here because Datalounge. If you want to view it on Youtube you could search Youtube for "Potential long-term hazards of COVID vaccines (from Livestream #58)"

Disclosure: I've been double-vaxxed. I do understand that there MIGHT be a risk of undiscovered long-term side effects from the vaccine, but the present risk of death or long covid for people in my age-group seems to be the bigger risk.

I have a STEM PhD, and this does not ring true to me. The vast majority of the STEM PhDs I know have been vaccinated. I can't speak for other fields, really. But I do notice that in their questionnaire, they did not ask if the responder has a PhD. They asked if they have a professional degree ("e.g. MD, JD, DVM")

Throughout my career I've encountered highly educated people who seemed like they weren't all that smart, and I think this is what's at play here. Yes, it takes a lot to get a PhD (or as the brother of my first real love interest called it, the progression from BullShit to MoreShit to PiledHigherandDeeper) but the ability to look beyond their area of specialty becomes illusive. The best example I can give is a guy I met with a PhD in engineering who worked in the biomedical field but who didn't "believe" in evolution because of his religious upbringing.

I don't believe this. Just another stealth anti-intellectual jab.

My niece and her husband are both vaccinated (Pfizer). They met in their Stanford chemistry PhD program, and are very normal, charming, interesting people. I doubt many science related PhDs are hesitant to get the vaccine. I don’t really care what other kinds of PhDs think.

It's worth noting that "PhD's are the most reluctant to get vaccinated" is only true for this past May. At the beginning of the study (January), PhDs were ahead of the hs and "some college" groups; the latter became less hesitant, which PhD hesitancy stayed about the same, so that in May they had top honors for stupid. But who knows where PhDs stand now, three months after the study concluded (and delta happened, and the surges).

FRIW, from my own experience it doesn't make sense that PhDs would be most hesitant. I have a PhD (historical field) and work in a university with plenty of other PhDs, and everyone I know (and the people I know are mostly in the humanities and social sciences) couldn't wait to get the vaccine. Which is a good thing, because the university has vaccine requirement, as is increasingly the case. No, we're not living in a bubble insulated from critical thinking about anti-vax propaganda. These people all overwhelmingly support the Democrats, which is also an indicator of likelihood to get vaccinated.

There's a rough correlation between states with most vaccinations and states with most PhDs per capita, so that's also at odds with these findings. Can anyone check the cross-tabs? Did the study oversample in red states? Certain academic or professional fields? Did they just happen to get a lot of New Age loonies?

*while PhD hestitancy*

*FWIW*

No, R13, the magats are proud to be uneducated. They equate higher education with liberal indoctrination.

The result seemed unlikely to me, but right before the shit hit the fan I was in the room with a physicist who was poo-pooing the risks of covid. Otherwise reasonable adults....

Bell curve explains all

Where does fat alcoholic trailer trash fit within that bell curve, R28?

The survey itself, as someone mentioned, is flawed due to self-reporting of education.

I happen to know a lot of Ph.Ds and they are all vaccinated.

[quote]I doubt many science related PhDs are hesitant to get the vaccine. I don’t really care what other kinds of PhDs think.

That's a good point and others have brought up STEM Ph.D.s and I probably should have said, when I said 80% of Ph.D.s I knew were nuts, that almost none of them were in STEM fields. It was mostly English, Anthropology, History, Agronomy, and a couple in Women's Studies (Gender Studies these days, I believe). The sanest of them was a Spanish language professor who was still prone to massive crankiness and slight eccentricity.

Learning that the study was self-reported education makes me think the whole thing is complete b.s. anyway.

I'm as smart as a PhD.

This so-called research came from the Daily Fail. Might as well have com out of The Weekly World News. Is Bat Boy also reluctant?

Bat Boy started the whole fucking mess to begin with, R34.

It was an online study. While Carnegie Mellon is a good school, I am gonna have my doubts about this finding.

OTOH, too many PhD programs rely on the generation of a certain weight of paper being generated for a thesis over a certain period of time on campus rather than the advancement of knowledge in a given area.

I thought they just used the PhD candidates to carry out the grant-funded projects (and to steal from if their research is any good)....

OP it is because they invested the most in their education... They think they're smarter than the rest of us... And they know they'll end up being low wage earners teaching in community college....They are a sick pathetic bunch.

[quote]my husband had to take her because she is old and pretending to be helpless

LOL, R7!

ROTFLMAO

I deal with specious stats like this all the time at my job.

A quick look at the survey reveals that it was done for the headline value and is, as others mentioned, a reflection of nothing.

It appears the survey was done in conjunction with (and thus via) Facebook, with zero controls as to who could respond or how many times they could respond.

You see these sorts of surveys with "This Just Can't Be True!" spins all the time on topics as banal as "45% of Americans Have Given Up Dairy Products" or "Only 10% Of Americans Expect To Own An Electric Car"

The issue is that the respondent pool is self-selected.

Add in who is actually on Facebook and bored enough to take the survey... and you have survey results that mean nothing.

So funny how you guys are content to appeal to authority when it's "but the DOCTORS AND SCIENTISTS!!!" and then it's "Oh PhD is just a piece of paper anyway!"

Not a peer reviewed paper. I actually read it. Lots of problems:

Attitudes are not great predictors of complex social behavior and taking that into account, the political variables were the ones that were robust in terms of hesitance persisting PhDs are 2.1% of the sample which means that they create noise rather than signal. Small subsamples, even a study this large are meaningless. The real take home is that the wingnuts were the most hesitant.

Didn’t I also read that medical doctors are the highest percent of vaccinated people in the medical industry? More than nurses, etc. they’re at 96 percent. Something isn’t right with this paper, and if r42 is right, it’s a matter of poor conclusions in a paper that wasn’t peer reviewed, and the paper decided that hesitancy equaled the fact that PhDs wouldn’t get the vaccine, when they actually did.

My sister is a Biochemist PhD. She got vaccinated, made sure everyone in our family was, and insists mother get her booster. She monitored all the FDA hearings and she analyzes all the data she can get her hands on from academic sources. We listen to her. So far we have escaped COVID except for three careless relatives. We follow simple rules, when we leave our homes we mask. We wash our hands, we do not attend large, crowded indoor events, and since we have decent weather 7 months out of the year we try to eat outdoor venues. Indoor venues that practice social distancing, and whose employees mask get our business.

Just the attitude here that "I know a lot of PhDs and they're all vaccinated" cracks me up -- as if that proves anything. How many do you know? A thousand? Or more like 12? Quite scientific. None of you would doubt any of these stats (no matter how specious) if it was claimed people who dropped out at 16 are the most reluctant. It's just DL running true to form.

R45, that’s ridiculous. People are questioning the conclusions because the paper is not peer reviewed and it flies in the face of facts.

[Quote]Researchers surveyed just over five million US adults in an online survey, with 10,000 reporting that they were educated to PhD level.

Because someone clicked a button o line that said so?

They got trolled.

Remember that pre-COVID, the biggest anti-vaxxers weren't right-wingers but "crunchy" hippie-type leftists. Maybe a holdover from that.

It’s an online survey that anyone could answer?? Come on people. It is in no way a scientific survey. How many anti vaxxers do you think trolled the poll and identified as PhDs? I bet a ton.

mainly, PhDs weren't smart enough to be MDs

PhDs aren't a monolith, of course. Some have a PhD in English, others Chemistry, others Art History, etc.

I wonder what the breakdown is in vaccine hesitancy. Do the PhDs in science get the vaccine en masse while those in English dont?

R50, that is so untrue.

I'm friends with several PHDs, I work in higher ED- NONE have been hesitant about the vaccination. none

[quote]that’s ridiculous. People are questioning the conclusions because the paper is not peer reviewed and it flies in the face of facts.

Did you understand the points? Someone upthread claimed the reason it wasn't likely to be true is because he knows a lot of PhDs and they're all vaxed. Also my point was that if this was about uneducated people, people wouldn't be questioning the conclusions or caring if the paper is peer reviewed. You know this as well as I do.

I don't find it odd. Look at that "Cyber Ninja" who went out hiking in the most unforgiving landscape with his wife, dog AND baby. They all died (from heatstroke, most likely). He was a very successful tech guy. A little knowledge can be dangerous.

Speculation as in R48 and R51 (let alone R50) is pointless; as has been pointed out several times upthread, the study's methods are poor and its very data only makes its conclusion true for a small part of May.

No, R54, we'd be questioning the conclusions and methods of any survey we were interested in.

R48, before covid there were many right-wing anti-vaxxers. In any case, people with PhDs aren't largely crunchy hippy types.

Obviously antivaxxers would love to troll an online survey like this. You don't need a PhD to see what happened.

All these stupid vaccine threads just scream “I’m scared!”

Pathetic Mary.

Okay, R58, you've posted that brainless provocation on one too many threads. Blocked.

R45: I read the paper. The tiny PhD subsample is not going to give a reliable result. If you knew about statistics, you wouldn't be parroting the stupid headline for this study.