[jacquesm]

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.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccin...

[Alex3917]

Also the HIV epidemic is thought to have been started by government vaccination programs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS

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:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/11/study-add...

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."

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2016/infectious-disea...

I think there is a major lack of critical thinking of both sides of the issue.

[spleeder]

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.

[omonra]

That's a very sad story - please accept my condolences.

Is the government providing you now with retrovirals?

[omonra]

If you actually read the article, you will see that vaccinations were real.

Not to mention that this story has absolutely nothing to do with Western anti-vaxer movement.

[jacquesm]

> 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.

[omonra]

"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.