Measles Cases Top Last Year’s Total
wsj.com
wsj.com
But there's also the record of government deception. Lying about the health impacts of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. And the nuclear power industry. The suspicious death of Karen Silkwood. Colluding with industry to cover up health impacts of air and groundwater pollution. Suppression of the EPA dioxin report during the Reagan era. Lying about health effects of Agent Orange on US troops and innocent Vietnamese civilians. And so on.
So is it really surprising that many people don't trust the government?
Edit: It's unlikely that thiomersal (organic mercury compound) caused autism. And it's worth noting that thiomersal levels in vaccines have generally been reduced in the last decade or two.
Science based education also improves attitudes and usage of condoms and contraceptives, and I’d argue the primary mechanism is countering bad ideas and the promotion of good ones.
For example, it's not a conspiracy at all to say that the government tracks people. It would be a conspiracy to say that you, yourself are being gang stalked without a rational basis for why the government would take immense interest in someone that's done absolutely nothing to potentially earn their ire.
In that sense, the anti-vaxx movement is rooted in a belief mindset much like gang stalking rather than any sort of rational empirical observations. The government had zero interest in using vaccines as a way of ensuring conformity, much less using it to target or poison individuals. It's the same cognitive dissonance that occurs when say, the NRA says that guns are for the sake of stopping tyranny while also supporting the police which function as the long arm of the government.
So given all that, it's not entirely unreasonable to worry that the government is lying. That it's publishing deceptive studies. Because they have before, about other issues.
Now the anti-vaxxer might say 'they are lying about vaccines not causing Autism' in which case that would be an irrational reason for lying. It would have to imply that governments around the world are solidly collaborating on the dangers of vaccines. This would not hold up to any scrutiny and is why anti-vaxx beliefs would be solidly irrational.
Why did the government lie about the health impacts of fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing? It's because they felt that above-ground tests were necessary for weapons' development. Also because they cost less.
Why would the government lie about the risk of vaccine injury? Because they want people to vaccinate themselves and their children. To protect the public health.
As a wild-ass guess, the public-health benefits of universal vaccination are likely great enough that appreciable injury risk is acceptable. But individuals don't really see evidence for public-health benefits. All they ever see are their kids being injured. So it's in the government's interest to reassure people.
But what dominates social media are reports of injuries.
Your point about the government lying about vaccines for the sake of public health is almost irrelevant, because that standard is applicable to everything the government does. Are our roads actually paved using the bones of children? No one knows, but the government would have a vested interest in lying about it because roads are important for American society.
You could use that logic to question everything and anything, but it doesn't say whether or not your base proposition is actually logically sound.
It doesn't help that the anti-vaxxer movement is a global one, not just an American one. Which means you would again have to consider somehow there's a global conspiracy surrounding vaccines in order to downplay the injuries they do to people.
Now is this to say vaccines don't have potentially harmful side effects? Well no, anyone that has read the research recognizes this fact. Including myself, considering I had an adverse reaction to vaccines as a child that was almost deadly. However the anti-vaxxer movement is not nor had it ever been about discussing the rational and factual effects of vaccines both positive and negative, it's been about perpetuating bunk science or conspiracies for the sake of an illogical set of beliefs.
However, as you say, there are occasional adverse reactions to vaccination. And how that's perceived is very different for individuals vs public-health systems. Public-health systems focus on reductions in epidemic risk. And they address adverse reactions by compensating those affected.
But individuals see only the adverse reactions. In themselves or their kids, if they're unlucky. Or in news from family and friends, or in news reports. Statistics about effects of mass vaccination on public health are just too abstract.
And on top of all that, as I've argued, governments have often lied. And do lie. For many reasons. The EPA is lying on a huge scale, now, in rolling back various protective rules.
Reported to VAERS? Compensated by NVIC? Most likely not since it's almost impossible to get the average doctor to report into VAERS.
Same reason as any: money. Pays well to ensure vaccines of dubious quality are fast-tracked [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merck-gerberding/former-c...
Before, I would have said net negative, but in the last couple of years, I am not so sure.
I've yet to actually meet someone who is against vaccines. (Or thinks the earth is flat, for that matter.) But judging by the posts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al, it makes it seem like every other person on the street is believing this stuff.
People naturally want to combat bad ideas with facts and such, and outrage culture loves having a scarecrow to pillory. Anti-vax and Flat Earthers are natural targets, but I can't help but wonder if all the soapboxing is just spreading their message far and wide--when without attention, it simply would have died out.
When you were the only flat-earther you knew, you kept mum about your lunacy. When Facebook recommends that you join the Pittsburgh Flat-Earth Society, all of a sudden, you have dozens of people who will validate your beliefs.
Social media - especially, bubble filter social media - is a new, incredibly virulent vector for ideas.
The seeds to the answer to your question lay in the rest of your post.
> I've yet to actually meet someone who is against vaccines. (Or thinks the earth is flat, for that matter.)
I have known anti-vaxxers, but your point stands: they're a relatively small but growing group, and a few years ago, they were a tiny group.
So we have a small but rapidly growing group of people, widely distributed, who believe in some insane things.
> But judging by the posts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al, it makes it seem like every other person on the street is believing this stuff.
Social media sites, by definition, want people to spend as much time on the site as possible. One way to get people to come to a site and stay is to have quality content. But...
> ... outrage culture loves having a scarecrow to pillory ...
This is slightly out of the context you posted it in, but this is the second to last step. Nothing holds people's attention more effectively than more primitive emotions, stuff that comes from our limbic system, a part of our brain that hosts fear, pleasure and anger.
In the not so distant past, the number of people an average person could communicate with was strictly limited. We were all highly partitioned, and information that went to the masses was highly curated.
This brings us to the final point: the social media sites actively seek to bring like-minded people together, and also directly and indirectly bring people together in a way that will create fights.
All of these serve to maximize site engagement, and thus profitability.
I'm skipping a lot of steps here, but I hope this will shed some light on the topic.
As healthcare becomes more and more of a financial liability for Americans, people look for alternatives, and antivax has a large, established community that has already conjured up answers to most of the basic objections to the idea.
Many vaccines are available for free even without insurance. If there is a wave of poor people now tagging along it’s because they’re falling to fear campaigns led by the original movement.
That moment really broke the movie for me. The Joker is effectively in charge of the butterfly effect. He flaps his wings, and gets what he wants in a "deus ex machina" style way. The odds of timing that so perfectly are astronomical.
You're telling me that a foreign adversary happened to pull this off? "Russia" is becoming a catch all bogey man for everything that we don't understand. There are far simpler answers to how this started to spread.
The most recent flareup got started with Andrew Wakefield's (fraudulent and now retracted) paper on MMR and autism that was published in Lancet in the late 90s.
I have. They also believe in all sorts of other weird things. But you don’t have to go very far to see similar things: Homeopathy for example. What’s called “Traditional Chinese Medicine” in germany (it’s nothing like that). There’s a lot of people that are well educated and should know better, but I’ve even been recommended homeopathic treatments by the nurse that gave the prep courses when my wife was pregnant.
Only that today, with Social Media, that small group can spread their deadly message much easier.
"Hi, I've never actually met a flat earther, but here's a comically bad argument they might make. Now, listen to me mouthbreathe into my microphone for the next 4 hours while I do a point by point exhaustive takedown video on why the world is indeed, a sphere. Join me next week for my next 4 hour installment where I continue to debate arguments they might make if I actually knew someone who was a flat earther."
The video will convince 1 person the world is round. For another 10 people, however, they will see resistance to their weakly held idea as evidence that they're believing the correct thing. Counter intuitively, this makes them grasp it tighter, like a Chinese Finger Trap. The harder you fight them, the more solid their viewpoint gets.
> Most recently, scientists at the United Kingdom’s (UK) Health Protection Agency (HPA) have found evidence of an association between Pandemrix and narcolepsy in children in England. The findings are consistent with studies from Finland and other countries.
It's easy to forget the level of mouth-foaming fear the media ginned up in response to 'H1N1'. And in subsequent years, they kept pushing the 'HxNx' fear based propaganda.
There are real risks associated with vaccines. The US federal government has displayed a pattern of lies and corruption. Why would the medical portion of said government be immune to that corruption? It's not.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
I very much hope I am wrong, but I don't think these parents will change their position regardless of the facts, and the only short-term solution may be external intervention. Again, I will be very glad if proven incorrect.
The problem is that infants can't be vaccinated for things like measles until they are 6 months old.
So people who aren't vaccinating their kids and have their kids running around spreading the measles virus in public places are risking the lives of any infants under 6 months of age who haven't even had a chance to be vaccinated.
It’s not limited to infants btw. People with immune deficiencies can’t be vaccinated either and for some people the vaccine doesn’t work. They’re all protected by herd immunity and if the vaccination rate falls below the critical threshold they’re all at risk.
"VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning it relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to CDC and FDA." It's known for not being a completely reliable dataset in the quantity and quality of reports. The numbers are generally assumed to be higher (worse) than presented - just not clear by how much.
For example, MMR has a typical reaction time of around 8-15 days - many people may have forgotten they gave a shot or if something happens, doctors are not likely to implicate the vaccines.
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't give vaccines - but that there is a risk (check out the data) and you should understand the risk and what factors increase the chances of a bad outcome (which vaccines, which combinations, which ages, etc.)
When you give power to the state, are you going to ensure that no one you don't like will ever come into power? What if we had given the previous president this power, how would the current one use it? Or the next one?
EDIT: To specifically answer your question, which i think is a good one:
> When you give power to the state, are you going to ensure that no one you don't like will ever come into power?
Yes! As they say, democracy is a 365 day-per-year job, and it's not a spectator sport. The only way to have a moral society is to participate.
We either need to quarantine people who refuse vaccinations out of society, censor anti-vax propaganda, or sit on our hands, as thousands of people, who were formerly protected by herd immunity fall sick and die.
Anti-vax memes are much like a virus - in the original, Dawkins, definition of 'meme'. Unfortunately, unlike measles, it is a virus that an absolutely free society cannot inoculate itself against.
Please do your part. Get yourself, and your children vaccinated. If you aren't sure if you got vaccinated, or if you got vaccinated only once, please talk to your doctor, and get an MMR booster shot.
Little over the top don't you think. California's law (no more non-medical exemptions for kids who attend schools) seems to be working as intended and vaccination rates are up. Of course, it's not perfect. The rate of supposed medical exemptions have gone up a bit. And keeping unvaccinated children from attending school obviously doesn't prevent all contact.
But overall it seems a reasonable compromise between anything goes and sending a SWAT team to vaccinate kids at gunpoint. There are legitimate medical exemptions after all so you can't expect to hit 100% coverage anyway. It just turns out that a lot of anti-vax parents aren't so anti-vax that they're willing to stay home and home school their children.
Whooping cough is part of the Tdap booster.