The moon is the size of a basketball, and it hovers about 150 yards above the Earth.

This claim is, of course, ridiculous. The moon is actually far away and very large. But the claim makes as much sense as the flawed thinking that many people bring to important issues every day. Let me play with the faulty moon story for a bit and then we can turn to a more serious matter.

If you go outside at night and look up, you can see the moon in the sky. (You might not see it if it’s cloudy, or a new moon, or you live in a brightly lighted city. But the moon is visible on most nights.) The fact that you can see the moon proves that it must be very close. Because evidence and experience tells us that very far away things cannot be seen. Look at this picture:

The village in the foreground is clear and bright and in focus. But the foothills in the distance are dim and faint. Below is another image that demonstrates the same effect. The nearest mountains are relatively clear, but those further away get mistier and hazier. The mountains farthest away are quite foggy and dim. They are hard to make out at all.

The farthest mountains in the above picture are probably not more than 50 miles away from the camera, yet they are almost lost in the sky. If they were twice as distant and twice as dim, would anyone be able to see them at all? Would something 200 miles away (supposing it weren’t sunk beneath the horizon) be visible at all?

The moon is supposedly about 240,000 miles away from the Earth. At that distance, it should be invisible because of the haze that we always observe when looking at distant objects. You know that is untrue. But take a moment to realize that the argument is reasonable. It is logical and based on two true premises:

Distant objects are hard to see. (This is true.)
The moon is not hard to see. (Also true.)
Therefore:
The moon is not a distant object. (False!)

To get from logical and wrong to well-informed and correct, we need additional information. The haziness we see when looking at distant objects is caused by Earth’s atmosphere. Water vapor distorts light. Dust particles obscure distant objects. There is a lot of that distortion when we look at a mountain 50 or more miles away. In cities, skyscrapers fade in the smoggy urban air at distances of only a couple of miles.

But when we look up into the sky, there isn’t as much distortion. The Earth’s atmosphere gets pretty thin only 10 miles up and beyond that the void of outer space has no moisture and very little dust. So the distortion we see when looking through the atmosphere at a mountain isn’t there when we look into the sky and beyond the atmosphere. Our view of the moon — 240,000 miles away — is much less obscured than our view of a mountain 50 miles away.

Again, pause a moment and try to think about these various bits of information and how persuasive each is. The evidence of distant haziness is there for each person to observe. Their own eyes tell them that the haze is real. And it is. From there, correct logic leads to a wrong conclusion.

To get beyond the wrong conclusion, a person must accept new information from outside sources. And of course there’s quite a lot of that. Telescopes and moon landings and the whole field of astronomy assure us that the moon is far away and very large (over 2,000 miles in diameter.) In this case, trusting well-informed sources gets you to the right conclusion better than trusting your own observations and logic.

But what about cases when an expert is wrong?

Recently, The Atlantic outed a writer named Alex Berenson who writes extensively about covid-19 and vaccinations and is wrong about almost everything.

The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man: In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson.

The Atlantic article, by Derek Thompson, is worth reading in total. But, to summarize, Berenson has a knack for taking isolated facts and drawing wrong conclusions from them. And also, for drawing conclusion from what isn’t said.

Berenson seems to enjoy spelunking through research to find esoteric statistics that he then dresses up with spooky language to make confusing points that sow doubt about the vaccines. Arguing that COVID-19 cases spike after the first dose, he directs people to the Pfizer-BioNTech FDA briefing document, which reports hundreds of “suspected but unconfirmed” COVID-19 cases in the trial’s vaccine group that aren’t counted as positive cases in the final efficacy analysis.

Berenson invites his readers to assume that the only possible reason those cases would be unconfirmed is that someone is hiding facts. The Atlantic article explains that those “suspected but unconfirmed” cases are all instances of a person having a symptom (a runny nose, a fever, aches and pains, etc.) after their first vaccine shot and therefore “suspected” of having covid. But in every case, the person took a nasal swab and was found not to have the virus (thus, “unconfirmed”). Unconfirmed in this case actually means confirmed to not have the virus.

Berenson takes solid evidence showing that none of the people in that report caught the disease after their first shot, and uses it to conjure suspicion that some untold number of them were sick, and that the vaccine doesn’t work.

It is unclear whether Berenson is a liar and a scoundrel, or just sloppy and ignorant. What is clear is that believing him is a test of party loyalty. He has appeared on Fox News many times, and appeared there again after the Atlantic article was published. The Daily Beast recounted how the conversation went, with Fox anchor Tucker Carlson defending Berenson because the Atlantic is left-leaning and therefore must be wrong.

So, is it all just a matter of picking who you believe based on party loyalty and hoping they steer you right? No it isn’t. Because there are deeper experts than the media reports and news anchors. Berenson makes claims about harm caused by the coronavirus vaccine that he justifies from scientific studies. The scientists who did those studies ought to know whether the conclusions Berenson draws from them are reasonable or not.

“If you must invite Berenson on your show, ask one of the scientists and experts he misrepresents in his tweets to join him on the segment. I can help: I have their emails and phone numbers,” he tweeted.
“The false claim that Berenson's repeated on Fox News this evening—that cases rise after the first dose of mRNA vaccines—was sourced to a Danish study,” Thompson followed up in another tweet. “I spoke to its lead author on the phone. She said Berenson didn't know what he was talking about.”

Somebody who “Didn’t know what he was talking about” is not somebody that anybody should listen to.