It is not about right or wrong, it is about trying to understand why they made this decision.
And that could be putting yourself into the position of someone with very particular experiences the health system (e.g. you where very vulnerable and doctors treated you like a piece of meat) on top of other circumstances (you have never been that ill that modern medicine saved your ass, most of your very real health problems have psychosomatic roots and the neighbour wife with magical esotheric healing abilities was the only one wbo really talked to you about it).
This is about understanding who these people are and where they come from and what lead them to their (at times utterly wrong) beliefs. Doing that will not somehow stain your belief (unless you built them on similar shaky grounds). Most people/nations/companies think they are the center of the universe and that they are doing the right thing, sometimes for the simple reason because they see themselves as “The Good” side
They developed some sort of culture, rituals or superstition that backs their behaviour. Of course this gets harder and harder to decipher with each iteration they take downwards the devils spiral into irrationality, until you look onto them from the outside and you tell yourself: no way on earth I understand where they come from with their &)$&)!&@) beliefs.
But if you want to effectively criticise, you need to know how to dismantle these beliefs, and in order to do that, you have to understand (not agree to!) their position.
If you feel like you are giving someone too much power simply by trying to take their perspective, this might have its roots in your own culture, rituals and beliefs.
So in the case of some antivaxxers the best alid ideas that come from their standpoint is probably a criticism of capitalistic medicine (incentive: make money, not heal) and (from their subjective position) untrustworthy medical professionals. On top of that, they suddenly can google every illness on the internet and they feel like they know more than the expert in the field (this is by the way a sentiment of our times, which again has its roots somewhere).
Of course antivaxxers are irrational lunatics, but if don’t just want to yell at them, but use rational arguments, then understanding their background will help tremendously.
Imagine your plane crashes in the middle of the desert. You are one of the survivors. One of the other survivors says he knows how to deal with this and will lead you out of the desert with his navigational skills.
After some time it turns out he belives the earth is flat. You know he is factually wrong and he will lead the whole group in circles till you starve. So you could embrace humility.. but on the other hand there are facts about the world that you don't really have to seriously debate, unless good points of doubt are raised that you can check. There are situations where not pointing out somebody's wrong believes and demand a rational explaination from them is the ethically wrong thing to do.
The odds in this story are starvation, the odds in the vaccination fad are: either killing people by damaging vaccines, or killing people by not vaccinating them. The thing is – this is not just some oppinion, the outcome of this will (independent of who is right) kill people.
I am not a person who vaccinates a lot, but I do and of course I was curious if there is something behind the claims of the supposed side effects of vaccination. And what I did was to embracing humility. I decided not to take a stance on this until I informed myself and talked to people who were convinced about the damaging nature of vaccines. The claims made here would be revolutionary if these people were right. So you check out where the idea comes from and you find that one study with multiple metholodical failures which comes to a weak conclusion that there is a link between autism and vaccines. And then you find a flood of studies who can't find that link. Then you talk with anti-vaxxers about it and suddenly you are the devil for even considering there is a doubt. But remember the stakes – in both cases innocent people die! What I discovered then is that this is not about truth or what is really to be observed in reality, but it rather is a belief rooted in a general "clean eating" ideology where detoxing is the law of the land (all of which seems to be based on a vague gut feeling about the own body and how it must be only be fed with certain substances). For others it was a part of a general conspiracy, that after questioning turned out so kookoo that I thaught I was talking to a schizophrenic patient at a mental facility. So even if it turns out they were right and vaccines have a net-negative effect on humanity, they just were right by accident and not because they really had a rational point that anyone could take seriously and follow.
But given the odds I considered they could be right, checked for myself, reached a the conclusion they very certainly are not right, also reached the conclusion that this idea will in a net result produce more harm than good and decided to speak out against it.
None of the anti-vaxxers I had contact with ever atempted to show this kind of humility or consideration themselves, despite this beeing a situation like the one in the desert: you weigh your belief against the lifes of other people. If I where in these shoes I'd try my best to disproof myself, because the consequences in both directions are not a joke. That is why I am interested in where these believes come from and why people so strongly stand behind this. And in my definition this is humility. I'd take back the "of course" as it displays the certainty I had after doing that research. There are obviously people for whom it isn't nearly as clear.
And that could be putting yourself into the position of someone with very particular experiences the health system (e.g. you where very vulnerable and doctors treated you like a piece of meat) on top of other circumstances (you have never been that ill that modern medicine saved your ass, most of your very real health problems have psychosomatic roots and the neighbour wife with magical esotheric healing abilities was the only one wbo really talked to you about it).
This is about understanding who these people are and where they come from and what lead them to their (at times utterly wrong) beliefs. Doing that will not somehow stain your belief (unless you built them on similar shaky grounds). Most people/nations/companies think they are the center of the universe and that they are doing the right thing, sometimes for the simple reason because they see themselves as “The Good” side
They developed some sort of culture, rituals or superstition that backs their behaviour. Of course this gets harder and harder to decipher with each iteration they take downwards the devils spiral into irrationality, until you look onto them from the outside and you tell yourself: no way on earth I understand where they come from with their &)$&)!&@) beliefs.
But if you want to effectively criticise, you need to know how to dismantle these beliefs, and in order to do that, you have to understand (not agree to!) their position.
If you feel like you are giving someone too much power simply by trying to take their perspective, this might have its roots in your own culture, rituals and beliefs.
So in the case of some antivaxxers the best alid ideas that come from their standpoint is probably a criticism of capitalistic medicine (incentive: make money, not heal) and (from their subjective position) untrustworthy medical professionals. On top of that, they suddenly can google every illness on the internet and they feel like they know more than the expert in the field (this is by the way a sentiment of our times, which again has its roots somewhere).
Of course antivaxxers are irrational lunatics, but if don’t just want to yell at them, but use rational arguments, then understanding their background will help tremendously.