/s
I really want to understand the logic that goes on the head of an anti-vax parent. I can't wrap my head around "This injection will make sure, with a very high degree of certainty, that my child does not die from a disease thought eradicated."
Science denial is fairly common, a surprising amount of the population engages in it at some degree selectively. Depending on your personal belief systems and political persuasions, you may engage in science denial yourself, and if so and you recognize it, you might better understand that logic.
A few common examples of science denial from around the political spectrum:
- Evolution, Darwinism, and Creationism
- Climate change denial
- Age of the Earth
- Sex / gender differences
- Flat earth
- Excess calories causes obesity
- Denial of obesity as a severe health disorder
- AIDS denialism
- Animal consciousness
- Moon landing
There are plenty of other examples, many of which are popular with educated peoples.
- Industry trial funding and other conflicts of interest
- No real placebo test - and it is normal according to the expert.
- etc.
"No included trial in the Cochrane review used a placebo comparator All 26 trials included in the Cochrane review used active comparators: adjuvants (aluminium hydroxide (Al[OH]3) or amorphous aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate [AAHS]) or hepatitis vaccines."
"The Cochrane authors mistakenly used the term placebo to describe the active comparators. They acknowledged that ‘The comparison of the risks of adverse events was compromised by the use of different products (adjuvants and hepatitis vaccines) administered to participants in the control group’. Nevertheless, this statement can easily be overlooked, as it comes after 7500 words about other issues in the discussion and under the heading ‘Potential biases in the review process’. Active comparators was not a bias in the review process but a bias in the design of the HPV vaccine trials."
source:
"The Cochrane HPV vaccine review was incomplete and ignored important evidence of bias"
BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine October 2018 | volume 23 | number 5 |
However, I recently had to do a risk assessment for myself for Japanese Encephalitis, which is a $400-800 vaccine that only has a few years of effective dosage at best, and has a mortality rate of 16,000 per year out of 4 billion exposed.
If there's any chance that the vaccine has some type of chemical or substance that would cause an adverse effect in me, even if it was free, I would take my chances without the vaccine.
Similarly, I haven't received a tetanus shot in decades, despite really wanting to. I simply don't have the money because I don't have insurance, but I feel the risks of the vaccine are worth the benefit of not having tetanus.
It seems that their arguments are changing [1].
The gist, as I understand it, of their changed argument: The media has overblown the recent measles outbreak, there are things way worse for our children than measles and we should not be influenced by this media hysteria. Measles is uncommon and treatable so we should not be forced to vaccinate our children.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2019/02/readers-respond-m...
[EDIT] Changed "evolved" to "changed".
http://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/whitepapers/ICAN Reply - December 31%2C 2018.pdf
(mind the spaces in the url)
He said it was a mistake looking back but they weren’t sure if vaccines caused autism so they erred on the side of caution in the 2000s. It’s remarkable they believe pseudo-science over medicine that quite literally eradicated terrible diseases.
Funnily enough, that's about the same time frame as when the kid receives their first vaccinations.
To the nonscientific mind, correlation=causation a lot of the time. Add to that the increased difficulty in caring for an autistic child, the belief that autistic people are "soulless" or somehow not capable of empathy, the desire of parents for their children to live a "normal" life, and the significant subset of parents who view their children as lifestyle accessories rather than independent people and so are embarrassed by a child with special needs, and you have enough fear and dread that things might've been different had I made the choice not to vaccinate to kick off a worldwide movement.
Screening specifically for autism isn't recommended before then, but that seems to because differentiating autism from other development delay or disorder is difficult then; it seems to often manifest detectable signs as early as 2 months, though they are mostly signs that could be associated with other developmental conditions.
> because it takes that long for the brain subsystems involved to be wired up in more or less their final configuration.
> Funnily enough, that's about the same time frame as when the kid receives their first vaccinations.
No, it's not. The first recommended vaccine (HepB first dose) is at birth, and there are a lot before 18 mo., by 18 mo. they are hitting the fourth dose for some vaccines.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
...and then right after the vaccine they are completely mentally retarded, can't make eye contact, and no longer speak the words they spoke prior to the vaccination.
What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child if they get the disease?
The answers to those vary per vaccine and could result in some parents deciding to not vaccinate their children for one or more vaccines.
Medical researchers know more than you about which vaccines are safe and should be administered.
> What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child if they get the disease?
For all of the regularly scheduled vaccines the answer is the risks of not vaccinating greatly outweigh those of receiving it, unless you have an allergy to something in that particular vaccine.
This is only true for healthy people who have had no reactions to vaccines, nor have their family members.
There are people who have life-long debilitating reactions. What is being proposed is to make it impossible to opt-out if you have a personal or family history with negative reactions to vaccines. Medical exemptions are impossible to get except for the very wealthy who can afford the appropriate testing to prove it's an issue.
That's what I said. Allergy, reaction, same thing.
- Many people believe their social network over authoritative sources.
- There is a general (and many times legitimate) distrust of "Big Pharma", especially in the US.
- Protecting children triggers a deep emotional instinct in parents. This provides a strong motivator for people to do research into what substances are being put in their childs bodies.
- Autism is scary for many, in part because its not currently well-understood, nor are its causes. Anti-vaxxers capitalize on this fear to present causal arguments in absence of an authoriative science-based one. People who need answers will find one, one way or another.
- Reported cases of autism are on the rise, this is a generally-accepted fact. This is most likely due to our improved understanding of what autism is of course, and not due to the rise of vaccines. We can shout "Correlation != Causation" all we want, but at the end of the day, scientific education is quite poor all over the world (especially in the US where its actively demeaned by many groups, whether for financial, ideological, or religious reasons), and a lot of people quite simply just don't think this way. We are hard-wired to find patterns in the world, and the world is complex - many people will quite simply find the wrong ones.
- Anti-vax is partially due to the success of vaccines, people of parenting age today were born into a world without polio, measles, smallpox, etc. This may lead people to believe the vaccine "didn't do anything" (which is kind of the point!). Preventative measures (vaccines) don't have the same response as reactive measures (cures), we're just not hard-wired for it emotionally.
- There exist a number of sources online that imply vaccines cause more harm than good. This is the first google result I found when searching "number of vaccines in usa", a realistic search term a concerned parent might use:
https://www.fourteenstudies.org/nowwhat.html
These present a number of studies that appear to show a link between vaccines and autism. As I sit here, I could not refute each study one-by-one, and other than the goofy styles, I could not articulate to an anti-vax parent, or even an undecided one, why these are bad science.
In fact, it doesn't even seem like an unreasonable hypothesis to me that "Big Pharma" is pushing vaccines of dubious necessity for profits - the incentive is clearly there.
So its not as illogical as it might seem - Fixing these attitudes is a difficult problem, and not one with an easy solution. We can start by improving scientific education, and improving the way that institutionalized knowledge is distributed. We need to somehow figure out how to collectively "remember" why these vaccines are necessary in the first place, well after the people affected by these diseases in the past are gone.
This is the first google result I found when searching