Comment by purplethinking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplethinking | Hacker News Reader

I'll use this as an opportunity to plead for some rebuttal to the anti-vaxxers' arguments. My wife doesn't want to vaccinate our child so this very personal. She's highly educated, knows statistics and reads research papers, but is now convinced by the arguments of this movement. The thing is that no debunking source I've found on vaccines does much to address their arguments, which include, but are not limited to:

* the profit incentive of the vaccine manufacturers

* herd immunity being questionable

* dangerous substances in the vaccines (mercury)

* the effectiveness of vaccines at all being in question

* the decline of disease mainly being due to better sanitation and conditions rather than vaccines

The whole autism thing is really a minor part of it. There are many arguments backed up by various cherry-picked research articles or spread by a few anti-vaxxing doctors and even previous researchers, just like with global warming.

What I need is some rebuttal, that is not by some random blogger, that addresses all their concerns without treating the anti-vaxxer as a high-school dropout stay at home mom. At this point the problem is much wider than a few uneducated people spreading nonsense.

Edit: interesting that I'm getting hammered with down-votes. If you're down voting, is it because this is too personal, off topic or what? I think the answer to my question can be very helpful to others facing similar situations.

The list of "concerns" you post indicate that you and/or your wife in fact have not read the literature or understand the statistics involved. If you had, you'd surely know that very few vaccines have contained mercury for a long time. You'd know that even though mercury in some forms and doses can be harmful that doesn't necessarily extend to all forms or doses (as is the case for almost all chemicals). Do you also go out of your way to avoid other sources of mercury - areas near or downstream of gold mines, some fish and shellfish, some electronic equipment? Or is your "concern" limited to (usually non-existent) mercury in vaccines? Studies of herd immunity from either the mathematical or epidemiological perspective are trivial to find. Saying it's questionable is like saying "teach the controversy" about evolution or climate change.

It's hard to see any good intent here. Given the tactics already in wide use among anti-vaxxers, I'm not going to rule out the possibility that this is less about a sincere search for strong arguments than about taking the opportunity to repeat a series of already discredited anti-vax tropes.

I think it's pretty clear from my post that I do not believe those arguments. I'm asking how to debunk them because I'm a software engineer, not a biologist or doctor. I do not have the time nor competency to read research papers in medicine. I think it would be very useful if there was some trustworthy source that put together all the facts, debunking anti-vaxxing all together, all at once.

Thimerosal in vaccines (which it mostly isn't): https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.... https://www.nvic.org/faqs/mercury-thimerosal.aspx

Herd immunity: https://thoughtscapism.com/2015/04/20/the-simple-math-of-her...

Effectiveness of vaccines: https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/graphic-proof-that-vaccin...

It's no accident that measles outbreaks have started to recur in the US, with a very strong correlation to rates of vaccine refusal. California is a good example; multiple outbreaks there have been directly linked to the prevalence of parents abusing the "personal belief" exemption to refuse vaccinations. The OP here is another example of this exceptionally close relationship. Correlation doesn't equal causation, of course, but the "experiment" has been done over and over many times in many different populations and the results are always the same: failure to vaccinate allows previously eliminated diseases to come back.

Thanks, the post on herd immunity looks very good.

How is the effectiveness in question?

The argument goes something like: there are outbreaks in populations with very high immunization levels, so they're not even effective! Or they're only effective for a time and only partially, so it's not worth the risk.

Interesting that in a way this might be a self-feeding cycle. People stop vaccinating, suddenly there are outbreaks in high-vaccination areas (really just smaller groups of people that do not vaccinate?), which then gets used as an argument against vaccinations.

To me, the effectiveness is the single most obvious argument for vaccinations. If that can't convince someone, maybe nothing can't.

I think a major point your wife and others don't understand is that being vaccinated doesn't mean you can't get a disease. But most diseases will be less deadly and harmfull

So the statistics most anti-vaxxers look up are about disease count while you should look at how many died.

And about mercury: sometimes traces can be found but are way too low to be harmfull. There is a much higher dose of mercury in some fish so that's why pregnant mothers and small kids should not eat those.

Are you and your wife vaccinated? Great, you survived all sorts of possible illness from Measles to Polio (which doesn't exist anymore thanks to ... vaccinations!). Now give your kids the same chance.

My wife was sorta-sceptical or rather ignorant on the topic but it didn't take me long to persuade her otherwise. Great tip, go all three together to those vaccinations, reduces stress for everyone and take off the rest of the day because some kids will be all agitated. That needle is a small break of trust your kid has in you, make sure you make it up to the kid.

Autism, the shitty idea Andrew Wakefield brought up and lost his license afterwards due to "for unethical behaviour, misconduct and fraud". Read it up on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield Don't follow what a Playboy model says when the software-magnate-turned-philantrophist is calling for more vaccinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Impact...

Sanitation, nice idea, but I think sewage system did the better job there (think Cholera). Air-born diseases don't care about how clean your hands are, and tbh, your immune system likes it dirty every now and then. If you know what I mean.

Btw, immune system, the longer your breast-feed the better it is for the kid's immune system and I hope your wife followed the WHO information on that. http://www.who.int/topics/breastfeeding/en/

Well, there's these visualisations about polio and measles in the United States, which are very compelling for the last two points.

http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/04/revisiting-the-vaccine...

Better sanitation as a reason would lead to cutoff lines to be not so sharp and to be around the same time for most diseases. I guess. So this throws serious doubt on better sanitation being a reason for decline in diseases.

That is very useful, thank you

Does your wife's non-wish outweigh your wish? Why?

I'd rather convince her with facts rather than making an ultimatum. In the end, it's probably not life and death. It's true that many of these diseases are extremely rare, and often rarely cause death or permanent injury. But I'm also thinking about other children who for some reason can't get vaccinated or are still susceptible after vaccination.

The sad thing is, you'll rarely convince anyone with facts, as soon as we are just ever so slightly into emotional or quasi-religious territory. Which is why antivaxers, moonhoaxers, and other assorted charlatans have such an easy run at us rational folks' expense.

Your best bet is probably to try scaring the shit out of her. Sorry, I didn't invent this state of the world.

If the eradication of smallpox isn't enough to convince your wife that vaccines are effective, then I don't think anything will convince her.

I don't think it's any single point that dominates their belief, but it's that they have so many "doubts" about vaccines to point to. As soon as you debunk one they move on to the next. In the end, even if you debunk all of them carefully, just the fact that there are so many "doubts" seem to fool the human brain into thinking things are not so clear. It's the same thing with global warming. The one dissenting scientist weighs the same as 10,000 on the other side. Or there's always the case from the past where the lone wolf scientist was right all along!

I'm hoping with enough good arguments and data I can sway her view, but I also know the human mind is incredibly bad at rational thought and interpreting statistics.

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