I'm so not surprised by the comments here, so far.
The core points here are good ones:
- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.
- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.
> legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once)
Viewing failures in isolation is not really helpful. You need to compare them to successes and the failure/success rate of the alternatives.
Things get even more complicated when you start distinguishing cure/ineffective/harmful.
"Of the 162 cases, eight cases were acquired outside the United States and imported. The last imported case caused by wild poliovirus into the United States was reported in 1993. The remaining 154 cases were vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) caused by live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV)."
162 polio-related issues, 8 from actual virus, 154 from the vaccine.
No, the probability of getting a health issue due to the vaccine has now become much higher then the probability of getting polio. Your comment rather suggests you don't know much about polio: I suggest looking it up.
But that only applies to diseases which lack a natural harbor like polio does, where eradication is practical. Stop vaccinating for measles and oh surprise there is now an outbreak of measles. We haven't needed to seriously vaccinate for polio for over a decade.
But that itself is all sorts of iffy because there are two quite different polio vaccines of different effectiveness.
It should be addressed with legislation making it a felony not to vaccinate your children by a reason early childhood age (e.g. 6 years or something), whether put in public school or not, and making proof of vaccination a requirement for federal aid for that person (e.g. student loans or assistance).
There are certain things that should be up for public debate and discourse, left to the courts, or up to personal preference. Vaccination is not one of them. "This shot will give my kids autism" is not reasonable and should not be treated as a reasonable concern any more than "Obama is Kenyan" or "We didn't land on the moon" should.
What would you think of a similar argument, but, instead of for forced vaccination, for forced compliance with following government nutritional recommendations when we feed children?
The health consequences of a childhood of poor eating are arguably as big a problem as many (but not all) of the diseases we vaccinate against were.
I've not been able to come up with a good argument to distinguish these, other than the health consequences of communicable diseases are more directly visible. Take measles, for instance. At the time a vaccine for it was developed and deployed, measles was infecting about half a million children in the US per year, and about 400 per year died. (40 years earlier, the number of cases per year was about the same, but deaths were about 20x higher).
If your kid gets measles, it is obvious that he's got a serious, dangerous health problem, especially if he is one of the ones who dies.
If you feed your kid in a way that ensures he's seriously obese and sets him on the road to almost certain diabetes by young adulthood, it's not immediately obvious to the naked eye that something is seriously wrong. Kids can have so much energy that even the fat kids can run around and ride bikes and skateboards and be active by adult standards. From an adult point of view, the main visible problem for the fat kid is likely to be social--the fat kid gets picked last for pick up sports games, things like that.
Also, what the parent could have done better to prevent the condition is more obvious with things like measles. Your kid gets measles, and I can confidently point my finger at you and say your mistake was not vaccinating.
Your kid is fat, and I can only speculate. Maybe you aren't making the kid exercise enough. Maybe you don't supervise his between meal eating and the kid has 6000 calories of candy and soda between each meal. Maybe you cook giant portions and make him clean his plate. Maybe the kid is a bully and steals the other kids' desserts at school.
So with measles since there is really only one thing parents can do wrong that can lead to the child getting it, it's easy to force people to not do that one thing. With childhood nutrition and fitness there are so many ways it can go wrong it is hard to force people to do it right. So maybe that's how forcing vaccination can be distinguished from forcing good nutrition?
Feeding children in a specific way: costly and complicated.
Vaccinating your kids: just take them to where you're told. Free and easy. Even a monkey can do it.
I wonder, do you also believe the rest of the world should impose crippling sanctions on the US because it knowingly causes potentially catastrophic damage to the environment and consumes absurd amounts of finite natural resources?
Should everyone actively undermine the US farming industry, which uses large amounts of antibiotics in ways that could reduce their effectiveness for treating humans?
There are a lot of government policies that, for better or worse, are not set entirely based on scientific merit. There is also, frankly, a lot of "science" that gets presented as evidence in these kinds of debates that isn't very scientific (though I am not suggesting the vaccination question specifically is an example). In any case, trying to shift attitudes towards more scientifically supported positions through threats is rarely successful.
With the vaccination issue, you also have to remember that we're mostly talking about parents trying to do what is right for their kids. Those parents may be ignorant, but again the best available solution to that is probably education and showing them convincing arguments that changing their position really is in the best interests of their child. If you can't make a solid case with real evidence, legislation is just forcing your personal beliefs on someone else down the barrel of a gun, and I think we should be extremely wary of governments interfering so aggressively in the way a loving parent wants to raise their child.
That legislation should be coupled with the removal of legal liability for children by parents. It cuts both ways, if parents are unable to make choices for their children (even if they are wrong choices) then they should be absolved of all legal responsibility for said children as they are no longer able to act as the guardian in a manner that they view as the best course of action by their children. I would go further and say all financial responsibility as well. Either we are a society that entrust parents to raise their children or we let the state raise them.
What you propose is legislating the greater body for the unsavory actions of a minority while it is becoming more common with more and more federalization of law it always conflicts with personal freedoms and leads to a less free society for all. Someone would find an action that you do at some point in your life, unsavory and illogical and quite possibly harmful to yourself or others, under what you propose we could just enact legislation for the greater good. This runs contrary to the spirit of the law of the land and ends up somewhere closer to fascism. Please note I am not implying that you are advocating fascism but taking away peoples choice to self determination even for their children certainly starts to lay the foundation for a very different society.
What you propose is a slippery slope on the path to the state raising children which in my opinion is a far scarier reality. Life involves risk, and sometimes it involves risk for children. I think it is fair to say if one has made a life choice that puts other kids at risk their kid cannot participate in activities that could place other kids at risk but it is a whole different level to mandate that we start making medical decisions for parents. If we do we should legally acknowledge that parents or at least the legal concept of guardianship as we know it no longer exist.
We got the "Vaccine Revolt" as result, people openly rebelled, and even tried to topple the government (the population formed a riotous mob and assaulted the government buildings, attempting to kill the rulers).
The government had to declare martial law, send troops to quell the rebellion, and internally exiled lots of people (the government sent the "exiles" to the state that was the most distant of the capital, and was also one of the least populous states).
I am very sure that in US, the people that would join such revolt, as the same ones that believe being armed to resist the government is good idea, you do the math.
Originally the anti-vaccine idiocy had its roots in the far left. It's found a home in the extremes of both ends of the spectrum. Pro-2A belief is not necessarily an extreme viewpoint in and of itself, but you'll certainly not find it in the extreme left. You will, however, find it in the moderate left and most of the right.
There's certainly some overlap but to imply that you're "very sure" they're the same group would make you very wrong.
Yeah, as I was reading the article I noticed a lot of parallels to gun control in the US.
The harder one part of society pulls against guns, the more convinced gun rights advocates become that this is all a bigger conspiracy to to disarm them and take away their agency.
I live in a rural part of the US and have many, many strong pro-gun friends and acquaintances. The vast majority (95%+ at least) do not think there is any conspiracy to disarm existing gun owners. To imply otherwise is disingenuous at best.
The problem is that a lot of times the restrictions don't make any sense. We'll ban 30-round magazines but not 20. We'll ban barrel shrouds that are entirely cosmetic. We'll ban pistol grips on shotguns that actually reduce the lethality of the weapon by making is less accurate. All the while these things are proposed by legislators who truly do not understand what they're talking about. It's worse than octogenarian Senators discussing the internet, it really is. There you have "it's a series of tubes," and here you have people referring to "the shoulder thing that goes up."
If you could have a well-spoken conservative Democrat who actually understood firearms and the culture surrounding them, who could propose real gun control solutions that aren't based on emotion or cosmetics, you'd probably get something passed.
In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy
Except you don't actually win. In conceding to their fears with an empathetic approach, you are enabling their delusions. That's the problem with placating unreasonable people - doing so inevitably emboldens them.
But do you want to live with this person? If I hold an opinion that's so sub optimal and I hold it because of emotional reasons I'd like someone to shake me out of it, not pet me on the head and smile.
>both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once
On the other hand, non-medicine (alternative medicine) and non-science (pseudoscience) have been spectacularly right more than once. That's the point. Agree with empathy angle and need for emotional arguments, though.
My guess is that this demographic would tend to categorize traditional Chinese medicine as being pseudoscience – if you agree, here's an example from within that system:
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Youyou Tu, a Chinese pharmacologist who identified powerful antimalarial compounds in a traditional Chinese medical formula that has been used for centuries to treat Malaria:
> Youyou Tu in China turned to traditional herbal medicine to tackle the challenge of developing novel Malaria therapies. From a large-scale screen of herbal remedies in Malaria-infected animals, an extract from the plant Artemisia annua emerged as an interesting candidate. However, the results were inconsistent, so Tu revisited the ancient literature and discovered clues that guided her in her quest to successfully extract the active component from Artemisia annua. Tu was the first to show that this component, later called Artemisinin, was highly effective against the Malaria parasite, both in infected animals and in humans (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/20...).
There are plenty of other examples if you are curious and inclined to do the research.
As an aside, I would argue that the type of empiricism within this system of medicine is indeed a type of science (cataloguing pharmacological agents for thousands of years and recording their effects in the treatment of myriad medical conditions), but it probably has little to no examples of the modern day notion of randomized clinical trials.
Medicine is usually right and only sometimes wrong, but alternative medicine is usually wrong and only sometimes right. The fact that medicine can be spectacularly or trivially wrong doesn't provide any inputs for change of personal healthcare strategy.
The CIA did more for the anti-vaccination movement than any kind of scientific publication ever will. People that are afraid of vaccination are so for many reasons (some of them totally nonsense, others with some basis in fact). But to have actual proof that a three letter agency used a (fake) vaccination drive to gather DNA from large numbers of innocents in order to get at a fugitive was something we could have really done without.
But a lot of 'pro-vaccine' folks just completely ignore the black swan problem, which is wrong.
Also the flu vaccine lowers your chances of dying in any given winter, but many studies show that it increase your chances of the flu dying over the course of your life. This is because the flu vaccine only confers immunity against those strains for 6 - 18 months, whereas getting the flu confers immunity against those strains for decades:
Also a lot of vaccines have had very little human testing. E.g. if you look at the CDC webpage for the japanese encephalitis vaccine, it says "There are no efficacy data for Ixiaro. The vaccine was licensed in the United States on the basis of its ability to induce JE virus neutralizing antibodies as a surrogate for protection."
In my country (Romania) HIV was actually spread through vaccinations. Indeed that is how I got infected as an infant. The problem was supposedly not with the vaccines themselves though but with the fact that they were reusing needles.
> If you actually read the article, you will see that vaccinations were real.
And if you had read the article you would have noticed that the second part of the vaccine plan was never administered.
> Not to mention that this story has absolutely nothing to do with Western anti-vaxer movement.
People are not vaccinating their children for all kinds of reasons, one of them is a distrust of authorities to have the best interest of their children at heart. For those people the cold hard proof that authorities are willing to use vaccination programs to further other ends is certainly not going to help swing them to the other side.
"And if you had read the article you would have noticed that the second part of the vaccine plan was never administered."
That doesn't make vaccinations fake, regardless of what some Guardian editor decides to put in his headline.
"People are not vaccinating their children for all kinds of reasons, one of them is a distrust of authorities to have the best interest of their children at heart. For those people the cold hard proof that authorities are willing to use vaccination programs to further other ends is certainly not going to help swing them to the other side."
This is nonsense. Then again antivaxers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, so they may see things that way.
My guess is that people don't want to vaccinate their kids simply because they perceive the potential negative risk from vaccinations to exceed potential gain.
They may distrust the government if they believe that the government wants to make sure there are no contagious diseases around but can accept a certain % of autism or whatever as a result. I don't think Bin Laden drive would make any difference for this calculus.
The author tries to make some fair points based on anecdotal evidence, but at its core, the article simply states that "I had a strong opinion about X that i imposed upon others. After being influenced by a romantic interest, I biased in another direction. Now I have a (new) strong opinion that i wish to impose upon others.".
In other words, the fundamental act is still same, it is just opinion that has changed.
This is a deep observation and it's how a lot of Art works: it's not the immediate object/product/action that makes sense. It's when you put it into a context to generate meaning.
To persevarate: I'm sure if the author ever breaks up, he'll cop to being led around by his hormones. In the meantime, his unaware writing is a bold sample of the process of mental rationalization.
And in that way, the artist is often in a bind: to intentionally produce a work that reveals an unconscious incorrectness, in order that other can properly contextualize it. The artist must be wrong in order to be right, to ruin their reputation to grow one.
He didn't work to change his opinions at all, if you read the article. He simply came up with a strategy to try to change others opinions in a different way.
>Go tell arachnophobic parents that you must put spiders on their child because society depends on it, and see how that goes
When children don't receive vaccines it is not just seen that they are endangering themselves, but other children aswell because of the possibility of spread/mutation (whether this is true or not it doesn't really matter, that's just a majority of public view at the moment).
So unlike the spider example, a direct vaccination example from a pro-vaxor's standpoint would be that NOT vaccinating everyone will put children in harm's way.
If you read the whole article, it's pretty clear that he hasn't missed any aspect of "the argument".
From the article: "But vaccines only work when everyone buys in. Public health depends on anti-vaxxers confronting their greatest fears for the benefit of others."
I'm pointing out the fact that this person is playing mental mind games to justify the SO's point because he is head over heals so to speak.
I read the full article, and your comment furthers my point. The author is playing on both sides of the fence. It's like my SO for example, I hate when people chew with their mouth open I find it a little disrespectful and yet she does it and I don't find it disturbing. My preferences and beliefs are strayed because of my love for her.
This is basically a blog post explaining how someone can have an affect on even the strongest of beliefs solely because of emotions....no matter how ridiculous. Powerful stuff.
It doesn't sound like his beliefs were affected at all. In the end, she decided to get her kid vaccinated. He was playing the long game, and it sounds like it paid off. It seems to me that you're the one missing the point.
How come there aren't any "anti-civil engineers" who go around claiming bridges aren't safe or "anti-aeronautical-engineers" who "believe" through common sense that planes can't fly? Electricity is reading our brainwaves. Vacuum cleaners suck out our souls. If there are they are rightly recognized as crackpots in need of psychiatric help.
Because the examples you're giving are clearly ridiculous, even to the layperson. Obviously planes can fly, nobody has ever gotten their soul sucked out by a vacuum cleaner, etc.
Now first let me say I think vaccines are a Very Good Thing, but people have actually been harmed by vaccines: it's extremely rare, and happened more in the past than it does today, but it can happen which makes it much harder to shake peoples' paranoia.
Believing electricity can read your thoughts is clearly crazy, but believing vaccines are harmful can just be a case of not understanding/respecting the probabilities involved.
The difference and paranoia arise from the intangibility of microbes and electricity/software. The closest you'll find are the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" people who exercise doubt in the face of the strength of structures.
There is also a "religious" movement, who believe all kind of crazy things about the universe and evolution. And there are a lot of them (in the US at least)....
The exceptions in this list are almost entirely due to possible allergic reactions. Take flu vaccines - most of them are created via eggs, so people allergic against eggs cannot use these vaccines, until especially prepared without using eggs. If no vaccine is available for your child, it should skip this especial vaccination. This also is the reason why it is so important that every child which can, should be vaccinated. If a small percentage of the population is not vaccinated, they are still safe/no danger to society due to the protection given by the vaccinated part of the population. This is not a reason to skip vaccinations for non-medical reasons.
Well, most people in the pro-vaxx community won't deny that vaccinating has risks. The risks of not vaccinating, however, are bigger in a lot of cases. I think that's the most important message in the article, that their concern might be justified, but that the coin has another side.
How do you convince your wife when your child gets the disease that vaccination would have protected them against
(which is far more likely to happen, and has cost thousands upon thousands of recorded deaths in the past)?
Your question is analogous to: "If you told you kid it's ok to go out and play, and while outside a car hit him, do you let the other child ever go out again?" probability wise.
But that's exactly what happens sometimes. Family was ridiculously overprotective of me and crossing roads because my sister got run over by a car. I was barely able to go out and do anything at all outside until I managed to get out of that environment because my older cousin got herself into drugs.
While this is merely anecdotal evidence, my story is not unique. The younger sibling paying dearly for the bias caretakers incurred thanks to correlation to a bad incident is far, far from a rare occurrence.
I'm curious how far the label "anti-vaxxer" extends. Does it also include people who accept the science behind vaccination, but who as a political principle are opposed to it being made compulsory?
It means you're against vaccination. If you think vaccination is good (or even just "meh") then I don't think the term can rightly be applied to you, regardless of how you feel about it being compulsory.
If you don't make it compulsory, then it doesn't work. Vaccination relies on herd immunity because the vaccination doesn't work for everyone; some people can't have the vaccine (allergic to one of its components), for other people it just doesn't take effect (biological systems are unreliable like that), so you have to have an over 90% vaccination rate for herd immunity to actually work. By allowing people to opt out, you're condemning a bunch of people to illness and death.
So you're arguing that flu vaccine must be mandatory? All the other vaccines (there sure are plenty)? You're just plain wrong about vaccination relying on herd immunity. Vaccine is still effective for those who take it. And the oft-repeated number "90%" has no scientific basis whatsoever, the herd immunity threshold is heavily dependent on how infectious the disease is, and plenty of other factors.
No, you're just plain wrong. Go read any of the scientific literature about it. And yes, it does have a scientific basis, that's why REAL SCIENTISTS talk about herd immunity. The vaccines are NOT effective for everyone who takes them, that's why herd immunity is necessary.
I looked at this article as a simple case study in being compassionate.
For me, learning to be compassionate has been a pretty big deal. While it is clearly great from a moral perspective, even from a selfish perspective it provides value. Just like the article states, it greatly improves communication and cooperation. Beyond that though, being compassionate makes me feel good.
I definitely recommend practicing compassion, particularly if you tend to be naturally critical, judgmental or cynical.
Is there any research anyone is aware of about a possible connection between movements like these and how Facebook promotes and displays certain types of articles to certain people?
Scaring people is a fantastic way to create and emotional connection and increase engagement do to the fear of missing out on new information. The type of thing that will get you to check your phone every couple minutes all day.
In the back of my head I've always felt(without any information to back it up) that the anti vaccination movement was one of the first real big public health impacts to come out of Facebook and other social applications that serve content designed to cause emotional reactions to increase engagement.
I should add that I do not believe any of this is intentional as opposed to simply optimizing for engagement over time.
The whole anti-science movement is in parts self inflicted. If someone reads one day that scientists discovered "walking" causes cancer and the next day that "walking" is the key to eternal living it is no wonder nobody takes any form of evidence serious anymore. We just see those studies coming out every other day - and journalists certainly playing their part by over-hyping them.
Once you realize how hard consensus finding is and all the personal interests and agendas involved, including the "big" failures of science (e.g smoking is save), I can see the point of people rejecting science as subjective.
Science isn't the problem. It's lay people ingesting their information from dumbed down articles written by professional journalists looking to sell more newspapers or get more clicks. Even if these studies were free and not stuck behind a paywall, your average person will not bother to read the details. Maybe it's human nature to want to be told what to believe. No one has time to do the independent research on every little thing they hear or read.
I know a couple anti-vaxxers, and they are very rational, but just selfish, people: they don't believe vaccines are evil in general, but rather they believe what is, basically, true: it is best of all if everyone else is vaccinated, but you aren't.
And what does it protect against? a bad case of diarrhea.
An intussusception is a medical condition in which a part of the intestine invaginates (folds into) into another section of intestine, similar to the way the parts of a collapsible telescope slide into one another.[1] This can often result in an obstruction. The part that prolapses into the other is called the intussusceptum, and the part that receives it is called the intussuscipiens. Intussusception is a medical emergency and a patient should be seen immediately to reduce risk.
Diarrhea kills more than a million people each year. In 2012, it was the second most common cause of deaths in children younger than five (0.76 million or 11%).
Be thankful that you live in a time and place that allow you to not take it very seriously. I know I'm thankful for this.
A really good article. Similar things are happening with so many things in our lives (feminism for instance). The worst is when people begin to deny the existence of real problems (like with vaccines, although they make sense, there really is some risk for the people that get vaccinated).
This article doesn't really dive into the issue in a real, honest way.
Vaccinations are generally a public health benefit, no doubt about it, but there's also much we don't understand about how the immune system works. It's not completely, entirely, 100% irrational to desire to avoid messing with something you don't fully understand. The more science you learn, sometimes, the more you learn how little we really know and understand about the complexities of our own bodies. With enough science, that can turn around and reinforce rationality; but I don't think we're there yet as a society in either the body of science available, nor the prevalence of good science education in the population.
I used to be in the same camp as the author. My mom is what I'd call a rational anti-vaxxer, and I hated her for it. She's a trained biologist. She vaccinated where she could see all the science and the benefit, but treated each vaccine as an independent entity, requiring new proof and new science and understanding of how it functioned and how effective it was and the cost/benefit to society before making the decision. When I turned 18, she turned the reins over to me and told me to make my own decisions based on all the data available. She trusted me with the science.
I took this to heart as an adult. I feel it is an excellent way to approach the problem, and in fact is more scientific than blindly accepting recommendations that have dozens of conflicting influences outside simple public health. This became particularly apparent to me as I now battle a chronic GI immune condition that has made my life extremely difficult over the past year. It took a full year to actually diagnose, and even then, what was the best doctors could tell me? "We have no idea what causes it, but we know it doesn't correlate to cancer. Here's some steroids. Good luck." I am not saying any vaccination causes this—I simply don't know—but it's that kind of doubt in the field that makes people doubt blanket statements on all vaccinations, whether that be right or wrong.
I agree with the author of this piece: we need more empathy, more understanding, and much less confrontation. But we also need more science, and a better understanding of science, and a more nuanced, honest discussion of vaccines in medicine and society. In a complex world, when a scientist hears "All X are good," they are right to be skeptical of it. We need to recognize that we live in a world where no one is allowed to have a conversation on vaccines based on reality. Instead, any discussion that doesn't qualify itself with the greatness of vaccines and the wrongness of anti-vaxxers instantly labels you an anti-vaxxer yourself, and loses you all credibility.
This article, too, succumbs to that mental virus. I refuse to. He says, "my point isn't that the anti-vaxxers might be right. They're not." With that attitude, we'll never be able to understand the problem scientifically as a populace, and that's what's wrong with our response to anti-vaxxers—not that they're wrong and delusional. If you want real empathy, stop calling people wrong all the time, and start trying to understand their fear instead of dismissing it and strategically trying to quell it.
Wow, someone who gets it. Science has really become the religion of our time, "scientists" are the priesthood. We should trust their recommendations unconditionally, without question.
If someone has an irrational fear that can pose harm to their child (or other children), the person should do something about it. Never letting a child to play with others, based on the fear that something might happen to in wouldn't be right, would it?
This whole discussion reminds me of seat belt law debate:
Pro-seat belt: "It will save hundreds of lives and reduce injuries"
Anti-seat belt: "What if an accident pushes my car into the water and the seatbelt jams and my child drowns."
Make it the law and put parents in jail. Better yet, since the first confrontation over vaccinations will be when the children are young, put them up for adoption. Lots of vetted, rational people looking to adopt young children.
You don't own "your" children, they are people and they have the right to proper medical care. Proper medical care isn't decided by irrational phobias and fears.
There are laws that you aren't allowed to wear your seatbelts in certain situations; e.g. on some ice roads in some countries (Estonia). Not that this is very relevant to anti vax.
The author comes across as a bit of an idiot too in the article. Basing his opinions on blogs and a particular internet community. Rather than acquiring an understanding from the scientific source material on these issues.
Basing his opinions on blogs and a particular internet community. Rather than acquiring an understanding from the scientific source material on these issues.
I expect that approximately 100% of the people who argue for vaccinating children are doing exactly the same thing. The number of parents personally familiar with the scientific evidence and qualified to make an independent judgement is probably tiny.
This then leads to the argument that non-experts should respect the scientific consensus, but then how does a non-expert evaluate the credentials of a commentator to determine whether they are in fact an expert and part of a real scientific consensus? Bad science abounds in the media, and there is a lot of money to be made from peddling it, and some of the people presenting it are very convincing because that's what they do.
This is a fundamental problem with any debate about policy based on scientific merit: at some stage, there is always a degree of trust involved for anyone who is not personally an expert in the subject matter, which in practice means almost everyone. This opens a gap for the critics and sceptics. And crucially, this is a legitimate concern. There is room for the "science" to be wrong, and sometimes it has been.
The rational point is that it is far more likely that a consensus among large numbers of people who are probably scientific experts will be correct. When that is the best information we have to go on, as it nearly always will be, we should probably make our decisions consistent with that consensus rather than in opposition to it to give ourselves the maximum chance of a positive outcome.
>This then leads to the argument that non-experts should respect the scientific consensus, but then how does a non-expert evaluate the credentials of a commentator to determine whether they are in fact an expert and part of a real scientific consensus?
This is an excellent and pertinent point. As the article delved into, a lot of these people are big followers of "alternative medicine", which is a field chock full of con artists and shysters claiming to be "experts". If someone is gullible, then they're easily convinced by these fraudsters that their "treatments" are real and work, even though it's just the placebo effect.
I'm just like the article's author: I was married to someone like this. My advice if you find yourself in a relationship with someone big into anti-vax or alternative medicine: GET OUT. If you have a logical worldview that isn't full of conspiracy theories, and you believe in things supported by real evidence, and your partner doesn't, then the disagreements over this stuff are going to tear your relationship apart. Just the sheer amount of money my wife spent on all that crap was one huge factor in our marriage failing.
The author gives a good overview of the psychology of an anti-vaxxer:
1) Anti-vaxxers aren't paranoid misfits
TL;DR: Anti-vaxxers are normally rational people, but with an incorrect view on a topic.
2) It's all about fear
TL;DR: Anti-vaxxers hold their view out of an irrational fear, similar to arachnophobia, and simply using reason and facts won't work, as they're not in a frame of mind to accept them.
3) If you think something is dangerous, it's logical to avoid it
TL;DR: Though their starting premise is misguided, an anti-vaxxer's reaction to vaccines is logical. Thus, there is an emotional component in the initial premise that, when confronted with facts and reason, lead them to dig their heels into the sand and hold the line instead of thinking logically.
4) There's an industry supporting anti-vaxxers — and we're driving them into its arms
TL;DR: There are people positioned to exploit fear, and it is these people who are validating the anti-vaccination movement, despite various ethical concerns, and allowing it to thrive. Without these people, the movement would have died out shortly after it had started. Also, anti-vaxxers seeks support from loved ones and people who have experience with the subject matter to validate their worldview.
5) Changing someone's mind doesn't just take love. It takes empathy.
TL;DR: Anti-vaxxers come to their erroneous conclusion about vaccinations after bad experiences, not logic. The road to change minds is through empathy, not attack.
He makes an interesting quote in his article: "The anti-vax position was not a deal breaker for me, but suggesting that we should expose her daughter to grave dangers for no good reason was a deal breaker for my wife." This reasoning could (and arguably should) be applied in reverse: suggesting that we should expose children to easily preventable dangers (various potentially lethal childhood illnesses) for no good reason should be a deal breaker in any kind of relationship. While empathy could change an anti-vaxxer's mind, the dangers of having children unvaccinated while this strategy is employed is too risky, so a more direct approach, in my mind, must be taken. It's like trusting someone to drive you to the store while they're very drunk when it's better to never get into the car and to stop them from driving, if possible.
Likewise, he compares the anti-vaxxer movement to arachnophobia. His conclusion to drop his stance on vaccination doesn't logically follow from this comparison, however, as arachnophobia is a mental illness, treated by certified therapists when the phobia starts preventing people from living their lives or driving people to impact other people's lives. The logical conclusion to this comparison is to treat the anti-vaccination movement as a mental illness, encourage anti-vaxxers to seek out certified therapists, and enact laws to prevent people who don't vaccinate their children or themselves from spreading easily preventable but potentially life and quality of life threatening diseases.
Damn, this is something I've been saying for a while (and also written a more succinct blog about[1]). The anti-vaxxer parents are victims of fraudsters who do this for monetary gain. It's the same story as with all pseudoscience.
Attacking parents will not stop it. Education and holding fraudsters responsible will. But education has to be, marketing wise, on the same level as what fraudsters are pumping out. Currently it really isn't (save for a few exceptions).
"Lead paint, tobacco, bloodletting [..] we ought to remember that the same sentence has been said, earnestly and confidently, about things that absolutely were hazardous."
I've heard this argument before but it sounds really wrong to me. Did anyone ever really say lead paint is absolutely safe? For all of these things I feel people just didn't think about it. They never thought 'hmm maybe if we put poisonous metal in paint (we knew lead was poisonous) it could go into the air and affect the brain development of our children' they just went to a hardware store and bought the paint that was good and cheap, assuming that since everyone else bought it, it would be good. Same for tobacco.
It was already known that lead was poisonous when leaded gas was invented, but there was a huge amount of lobbying saying it was safe by the car industry.
I almost married an anti-vaxxer. And then I realized there are another couple million people in this country I could marry and not have to fight over that stuff about the rest of my life.
It wasn't just vaccines she was worried about. She was also vegan. Only ate organic. I'm fine if those are your choices but I don't want them forced upon me, or a lecture when I eat a hotdog, take an aspirin, or drink milk.
Constant fear of everything in the environment requires psychological help.
You made the right choice. I wish someone had convinced me to avoid my marriage. My last wife wasn't a really strong anti-vaxxer (we never had kids, so it never was a big issue), but she did buy into it and closely related, she was really big into "alternative medicine". She spent a ridiculous amount of money on that crap, and of course that was one of the big factors that lead to our marriage failing.
I agree with the other guy though about you conflating things. You're right that being anti-vax and using alternative medicine is largely about fear (which she has problems with in many other areas too: she's afraid of terrorists, she's afraid of illegals, I could go on and on), but veganism, as far as I can tell, is not about fear, it's about an extreme philosophical position where those people don't want to hurt or abuse animals in any way. (The problem with the position, of course, is it's just not very practical.) I don't see the two as the same at all; my wife wasn't into veganism at all. She was into organic stuff though, which of course is based on fear, though not completely irrational as a lot of our food in this country is of shitty quality and many farming practices are questionable (for instance, giving livestock tons of antibiotics even when they don't need it, which is causing more antibiotic-resistant bacteria to arise).
If you're in the position of dating someone who you might have kids with, and she's anti-vax, I recommend getting out ASAP. You're going to end up having horrible fights over it. If you're past the age of having kids, it's less of an issue, but it's still a good indicator of a very different worldview, so I recommend avoiding those people.
Asprin is derived from the bark of the willow tree.
From Wikipedia: "The therapeutic properties of willow tree bark have been known for at least 2,400 years, with Hippocrates prescribing it for headaches"
"By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine;" (From Tim Michin's poem "Storm")
http://www.timminchin.com/2011/04/08/storm/
Sounds like you're conflating a few different things here. I don't know any vegans who are vegan out of fear. Usually it is a question of empathy for animals, or for the health benefits.
The core points here are good ones:
- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.
- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.