“If you think the world’s top scientists are trying to kill you, then why would you listen to any expert about anything? They’ll save you from yourself when you’re wrong anyway. Would you do the same for them? That’s why they’re trustworthy, and you and your sources are not.”

“Bye.”

Then leave and stay gone.

Not everything requires a response and at some point you have to pick your battles. They have revealed to you that they are an idiot. It is not your job to fix them.

You can’t logic someone out of something they didn’t logic themselves into, and they definitely got emotionally attached to antivax before they found “statistics” to back shit up.

Tell them that you’re a sheeple, and got the safe dose of the vaccine, since they want to keep the compliant people around. Tell them it’s too bad they’re on “the list” of bad people.

I generally reframe it from a perspective even they think they understand: Money.

Governments want their money. Less Population = Less Taxes for them to take, ergo, no government is trying to lower their population. And do they, the audience, think that the government is willing to have less money?

I don’t think so!

Maybe not the answer you’re looking for, but I have an uncle like that.

I suggest going no contact if you can.

Reason being, they don’t care about facts, nothing you say will convince them.

You just stop talking to them entirely. Sorry.

A lot of people are saying cut them off, but I have a family member who was into the anti-vax conspiracy theories and kinda still is, but it’s much less of a focus now and is pretty obviously just being carried forward by cognitive dissonance at this point. There will never be total victory, but there can be a reasonable truce.

What I’d suggest is the most counter-intuitive strategy - show genuine interest. Say “Ok, I want to know more, but I need you to be specific. Tell me what your theory is and what the evidence is, I’ll take my time looking at it, and respond in detail.”

Keep in mind, they probably won’t pay attention to whatever your respond with. That’s ok. The response isn’t the point, pinning them down on what they think is. So often these things are purely emotional, and forcing them into a logical framework will make them do the work for you. As for the response, odds are it’s some combination of cherry-picked data and spurious correlations, if not outright made up facts. Think of alternate explanations for what they’re showing you that are more plausible than a vaccine killing people. And remember that if the vaccine really was killing people, it would be really obvious, not something we need look deep into the matrix to find.

If you think they’d be open to it, try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:

A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.

Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree with them on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).

If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption they have no evidence for.

Don’t bother. Anything bad you say will be dismissed as a ‘smear’ campaign against that person because ‘they’ (big pharma, the millions of scientists who are all in on “it”) don’t want you to know and they’ll just shut off against you. Just take a step back from the dolt.

“If that were true, I’d be trying even harder to make you take it.”

Disengage and choose your family

Ask for the comparison in excess deaths comparison of vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

What’s the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate?

“You are a fucking idiot” usually does the job.