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Comment by charliesharding | Hacker News Reader

Posts like this make me wonder who doesn't think they're safe so I did some light digging for anyone who's curious.

"Skepticism with vaccines crosses party and demographic lines, according to the Pew Research Center study released Monday, with about 5% of Republicans and 9% of Democrats saying vaccines are unsafe, and 11% of men and 8% of women saying the same.

Younger people, however, were significantly more likely to believe vaccines are unsafe, with 15% of Americans aged 18-29 saying vaccines aren’t safe, compared with just 4% of Americans over age 65."

https://time.com/3701543/measles-vaccines-poll-anti-vaxxers/

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"Posts like this make me wonder who doesn't think they're safe so I did some light digging for anyone who's curious."

The MMR vaccine (a 3-in-1 vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella) has been dogged by claims that it is unsafe and causes autism. These claims have been proven false, but the damage persists.

I recommend anyone interested in this subject read this article:

'No link between MMR and autism,' major study finds

https://www.nhs.uk/news/medication/no-link-between-mmr-and-a...

It's even worse: there are no reputable claims that vaccines are unsafe (in the sense anti-vaccination advocates mean, anyway).

The only semi-scientific paper was the one which sparked it all, by Andrew Wakefield [0], who is:

> "a discredited former British doctor who became an anti-vaccine activist. He was a gastroenterologist until he was struck off the UK medical register for unethical behaviour, misconduct, and dishonesty for authoring a fraudulent research paper that claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism and bowel disease"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

Wakefield had a financial interest, as well.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2011/01/wakefield_t...

> In the new report, Deer describes a variety of efforts Wakefield undertook to make money from his work. For example, Wakefield and his associates predicted they could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits alone for a condition he argued affected autistic children dubbed "austistic enterocolitis," according to one 35-page document.

If you look at other areas of the world, Philippines is interesting [0]:

> [I]n 2018, 32 percent of the surveyed 1,500 Filipinos trusted vaccines. In the 2015 iteration of the poll, 93 percent of the respondents said they trusted vaccines.

> Health Secretary Francisco Duque III attributes the lowered trust on the government's immunization drive due to the Dengvaxia controversy.

---

I also saw someone on Twitter questioning if that decline in trust was related to the Philippines' continued obsession with social media [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Philippines_measles_outbr...

[1]: https://news.abs-cbn.com/focus/01/31/19/filipinos-still-worl...

> compared with just 4% of Americans over age 65

I.e. people who remember life without vaccines.

My great grandmother lived through the last smallpox outbreak in Canada, where their boarder caught it and she had to be quarantined.

My grandmother told us about how she come back to school after summer vacation and found out about friends that died from measles.

I had a vice principal who had polio as a child.

None of those are around now, although measles is making a run for it.

There are still loads of men around that have decreased fertility or even infertilitt due to mumps. Without ever asking around I know at least three men that had fertility problems, probably due to severe orchitis after mumps.

In Sweden they included mumps in the vaccination programme 1975ish, which probably means the USA got it sometime during the 60s. That means you have probably all met someone that had testicle or pancreas inflammation due to mumps. Both of them very very painful.

More Democrats than Republicans? I find that surprising.

that's not the right breakdown; it's really far-left progressive democrats who associate with natural living.

I can see that. But are there more of them than there are Republicans who don't believe in science?

Take a look at the article the article links to (https://www.people-press.org/2015/02/09/83-percent-say-measl...) and you'll see it's more nuanced.

A nontrivial amount of opposition to vaccines comes from communities, both online and in person, that circulate accounts of atrocities committed by authorities. Naturally, accounts of mistreatment, whether or not its systemic nature is seeming or proven, will weaken trust in institutions. Good actors are always having to compensate for the activities of bad actors, even if those bad actors were in the distant past.

But it says a lot about our society and the quality of our institutions that the lack of trust isn't just among groups that have themselves been mistreated, but is also found in others who observe these issues of social justice from a position of relative privilege. Based on their observations, some of them have concluded that it's far from certain that malice, corruption, or lack of transparency don't factor into the mainstream stance on this issue today, likely because there is evidence that similar factors were at play in similar issues in the past, and the incentive structure of actors and organizations need not have meaningfully changed.

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