Dealing with my dad has helped me maintain (some) empathy- but it helps a lot that he has never bullied, insulted, or cut me off for our differences on this topic.

When I would hear him talk about his position- incredibly afraid of covid, which he views as incredibly deadly, and overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines and vaccine mandates, both of which he believed were 100% effective- two immediate themes would always emerge for me:

1) he has framed it (or, more importantly, it has been framed for him) as being identical to past outbreaks of contagious disease with past vaccines being introduced. The nuances between things like MMR/polio vaccines and covid "vaccines" is lost on him, as they are never presented to him.

2) like the majority of people his age that I interact with, he gets all of his information from one, or at most two, legacy news sources- most commonly CNN or the New York Times and nowhere else. He/they are completely unaware (because it simply doesn't exist in their universe) of independent news sources or non-mainstream journalism (like, say, Project Veritas)- such things are conflated with "Qanon conspiracy theories shared on Facebook," because, again, he/they have never personally seen them and are not motivated to.