The Empathy Weapon

Same Sermon, Different Pew

This morning The New York Times published an essay by an immunologist who wasn’t vaccinated as a child, found science, got her shots, and now wants to help other parents see the light. It’s got that signature NYT sheen, is well written and emotionally compelling. And yet, if you’ve been paying attention to the media machine you can see that this piece is merely emotional blackmail. It’s sophisticated and speaks in the language of maternal love. The fact that it’s dressed in a lab coat is the tell.

The essay’s argument is simple: the author’s mother didn’t vaccinate her out of love. The author now vaccinates her own children out of love. The only difference is information and emotional support. The moral of the story? Parents who don’t vaccinate aren’t bad people - they just haven’t been guided to the correct conclusion yet.

Anyone not asleep through the last few years may recognize the game.

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In 2021, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul stood before a congregation and told them the vaccinated were “the smart ones,” that those who refused were “not listening to God,” and that the faithful needed to go out as “apostles” and convert the unbelievers. It was cheap, crude and disgraceful on so many layers.

And then there was Bill de Blasio. In the middle of the city’s vaccine push, the mayor of New York went on camera dangling a plate of burger and fries, moaning “Mmm, vaccination” like he was filming a McDonalds commercial.

I’ve never been more ashamed to be a New Yorker than watching those two represent my hometown during that period.

The Times essay is precisely the same sermon for a different congregation. Three pitches for the exact same product. De Blasio dangled fries at people who couldn’t afford to say no. Hochul played to the soul. The Times aims square at the laptop class. The approach may look different but the reveal is obvious: there is only one correct answer and the institutions hold it. These are all merely tactics to get the holdouts to convert.

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Interestingly, the Times piece never mentions that the United States has the most aggressive childhood vaccine schedule in the developed world. It never mentions that in 1986, Congress passed a law shielding vaccine manufacturers from traditional liability - we were told that wasn’t because the products were dangerous but rather because manufacturers were threatening to leave the market without protection from lawsuits. Perhaps most tellingly, it never asks the obvious common-sense question: why did Congress decide that the only way to keep vaccines flowing was to remove the legal accountability that applies to virtually every other product you put in your body? And what has that tradeoff cost in public trust?

It never mentions the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out over $4 billion to families over the decades - a federal court that exists for the sole purpose of acknowledging that these injuries are real. You’d think that would make conversations about risk perfectly reasonable. Apparently not. Instead, raising the topic at all gets you labeled dangerous.

It never mentions the work of researchers like Toby Rogers or organizations like Children’s Health Defense who’ve spent years digging into the actual data on adverse events, pushing back on the accepted risk-benefit math, and demanding that manufacturers and regulators show their work. For what it's worth, agreeing with everything they publish isn't the point. These people don't exist in any mainstream conversation about vaccines. They’re not debated. They’re not refuted. Just absent. If I didn’t know better I’d call that a guardrail, not a mere oversight.

I would argue that absence is doing more to erode public trust than anything those researchers have ever published. When parents go looking for answers and find a whole world of data the New York Times pretends doesn't exist, they may conclude the Times is handling its readers, not informing them.

You don’t have to oppose a single vaccine to find that troubling. You just have to believe that parents deserve an honest public conversation.

The essay’s author describes her own mother’s pediatrician dismissing her questions and rushing through the appointment. She calls that a failure of the system. What I found most interesting - and obvious - is that her essay does the exact same thing from the opposite vantage point. It blows right past every hard question to land on the answer that was already decided before she started writing. Is that an oversight or merely lying by omission? Students of propaganda know the latter can be devastatingly effective.

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I know this firsthand. When my wife and I had kids, one of my best friends pleaded with us not to vaccinate them. I knew he wasn’t someone who made stuff up or had an agenda other than truth. I mean how bad could this stuff be if it’s the standard that most parents accept? Only lunatics like my buddy took this path, right? Deep down, maybe I knew he was right - and smarter than me - but I was intellectually lazy. I didn’t want to do the work of digging into the history, boring science papers, or understanding how the machine actually operated. Instead, we took the middle ground. We thought we were being clever by spacing the required shots out. In retrospect, this was a cop-out. We negotiated with a system we didn’t fully trust but couldn’t be bothered to confront.

If I had to do it all over again, you’d have to kill me before you put a needle in my child. Not because I claim to have any certainty that my kids would be harmed. But because I’ve seen enough to question the entire framework - the liability shields, the “anti-vaxxer” moniker, the suppressed conversations, the institutional refusal to engage with anything that challenges the script. Once you see how this all works, you can’t unsee it. How could I possibly inject my children with trust I no longer have?

But this rant isn’t about science. That’s a much longer and more nuanced discussion. It’s about the con.

The game is as simple as it is pretty diabolical: frame the debate so that only one conclusion is possible, then demonstrate some sense of open-mindedness about how people arrive at that conclusion. Be empathic about the journey. Be compassionate about the struggle. Just never, ever allow the destination to be questioned.

The essayist extends empathy to hesitant parents, but it's quite obviously a conversion technique. She doesn't extend it to the parents whose children had seizures after their shots. Or to the families who watched their kids regress and spent years being told it was coincidence. Or to anyone who looked at the evidence and arrived at the “wrong” answer. Her compassion has a direction, and it points toward bending the knee to the socially acceptable answer. Anything else would be uncouth and silly.

I’d admire the elegance of it if it wasn’t so dang sinister. It preys on what I perceive to be one of the best attributes of our species (empathy) by attacking on some of our obvious blind spots (fear, conformity). It appropriates the language of understanding and kindness to shut down the conversation it pretends to open. It says “I see you, I hear you… now shut up and do what you’re told.”

And it isn’t unique to vaccines. Question the Fed and you don't understand economics. Question the electoral process and you’re a threat to democracy. Question the war and you don’t support the troops. The frame always seems to have the same ring to it: acknowledge the concern, validate the emotion, then guide the audience to the conclusion that was never actually in question. The only thing that changes is the topic.

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Any parent with common sense can see through this if they stop long enough to ask a few basic questions. Why does a safe product need legal immunity? Why are the most informed parents the most hesitant? Why does every mainstream conversation about this topic follow the exact same script - acknowledge concerns, redirect to compliance, never engage the substance? And why are the researchers and advocates doing the hardest work on this subject kept outside the view of acceptable discourse?

The NYT essay ends with the line: “My reason was the same as my mother’s: I love them deeply.”

It’s a beautiful sentence demonstrating a thoughtful literary technique. If I were one of those “conspiracy theorists” I’ve been reading so much about lately, I might also suggest it’s a trap. The implication is that that love only goes one direction - toward the needle - and if you chose differently, well, you just didn't know any better.

Love isn’t what divided us; our institutions did. And parents didn’t suddenly become anti-science. They became anti-arrogance and anti-gaslighting.

If those overseeing the organizations that are supposed to inform and protect us - the doctors’ offices, the universities and yes, the NYT - want our trust back, I’m pretty confident they must trade their certainty for some humility. I’m cynical we’ll ever get there, largely because that would require opening a conversation the entire system is designed to prevent - and publishing essays in the New York Times that don’t end with everyone agreeing to roll up their sleeves.