[the8472]

> 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.

[prostoalex]

What if the numbers work out against vaccination?

To quote CDC http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm

"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.

[XorNot]

Vaccine induced polio is not nearly as bad as wild-type polio. And this would also be the reason we phased out giving the polio vaccine.

[prostoalex]

So the probability of a health issue attributed to vaccine is higher than probability of a health issue attributed to the original disease.

Isn't that the core of the anti-vaxxers arguments?

[XorNot]

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.

[prostoalex]

Imagine a member of general public not knowing much about polio. Imagine them reading the fact that medical establishment knowingly injected people with problematic substances, and then apologetically backed down from its position later on and reverted its recommendations. Scanning the health news seems to imply similar retractions in other areas of medical research (saturated fats were bad, and now they're not; coffee was dangerous, and now it's good for you). There's also the news that flu vaccines are basically useless as they fight last year's flu.

Now try to convince the aforementioned member of general public to treat the current corpus of medical research as a gospel.

I dont't defend those decisions, but I can see how a rational person might develop somewhat of a sceptical view.