Why bring facts to a sophisticated misinformation campaign?  Many people will believe anything, because they want to or because they are scared.  Many people value feelings over rationality.

They accept a false premise that if something is statistically good for you, it has zero risks, instead of less risk than the alternative.  

They have a bias to accept a known risk, instead of a lesser known risk of much less frequency and severity.  This can be overcome with better education, scientific method understanding, and critical thinking skills, but that is apparently more difficult for our parenting and education system to achieve than it was a couple generations ago.

They accept a false premise that accepting the same methodology used to evaluate a century old technology is the same methodology that should be used to evaluate a more advanced technology. 

They repeat tired arguments from years ago as today, as though there haven’t been advances in the intermediate time.

The elevation of emotion and misinformation over scientific education and rationality is disheartening.  I think my grandparents who were in the Depression and WW2 Generation would be much discouraged.