The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.
I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to work successfully, you need to socialize people from birth so their gut feelings are directionally correct. And you need to cultivate trust in certain institutions, in particular public health, by targeting every segment of society on their own terms and jealously guarding the institution’s credibility.
My dad worked on maternal health programs in Bangladesh. They’d build hospitals, but women in the villages wouldn’t use them. Turns out they didn’t trust the doctors, they trusted the village midwives and traditional healers. So my dad proposed to network with the midwives to establish reciprocal trust. This worked because it reflected how human trust networks operate. Public health in a developed country shouldn’t work any differently (and certainly shouldn’t work the way it does now in the U.S.).
It was never about that. The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud But it's not like the anti-vaxxers ever fully understood the original paper, much less the follow-up papers disputing it. And in fairness to the anti-vaxxers, the paper is an example of the failure of scientific peer review. What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper and became frightened, which is natural, but then when Wakefield's fraud and conflicts of interest were revealed, and the paper was ultimately retracted, the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.
I suspect that people are reluctant to admit that they were duped, so they'd rather continue to believe something that's been proven false. It's emotional, not rational. And it's also social: people tend to surround themselves with others who reinforce their beliefs. This prevents backtracking and self-correction, because you have to convince your entire social group that they were wrong, not just yourself.
As far as I can tell, the modern movement is fueled by personal anecdotes of family members / friends having young children present with autism after certain developmental milestones. The family goes, what went wrong? Well, we recently got them a bunch of shots, maybe it was that. Combined with the expanding vaccination schedule those coincidences are increasingly likely to occur. Then yeah that paper comes up when the families do a bit of research which does add more conviction to the belief.
You've got "post hoc ergo propter hoc" plus the naturalistic fallacy. Might as well label the vaccines as a needle full of capitalism juice.
I don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.
When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.
It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.
That's the funny thing, though. Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too. It makes no sense to claim that The Lancet is untrustworthy while you still base your beliefs on a paper because it was published in The Lancet. If the journal goes down, the journal articles have to go down with it.
The difference is that these people had spent years building a personal identity around vaccine skepticism, as embattled fighters for the safety of children. Retraction of their beliefs would have been very painful, a blow to their self-image. Thus, it was easier to invent conspiracy theories about how their beliefs are still true, and now there's a cover-up.
Obviously you should be skeptical of anything they said. There was indisputably one big lie, whether then or now. If you really want to know which is the lie, you'd need to get independent confirmation.
The explanation of the lie matters. If it's, "I lied about cheating on you, and now I want you back", then lolno. If it was more like, "I was just sick of you, but you wouldn't have left me unless I drove you away", that's more plausible.
To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.
I guess I misunderstood your question then. I thought you were responding to, "Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too."
I think we've already established what an average person would do: not revise their beliefs in light of new evidence.
> To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.
I think this overcomplicates the situation, which is just about beliefs, evidence, and changing your mind. And people do change their minds in light of new evidence... about topics to which they're not emotionally attached. It's the emotional attachment to beliefs that causes people to perform mental cartwheels and stand on their heads just to avoid admitting the obvious truth.
For the most part, professional science, its complex math and statistics, operates in a parallel universe to our daily lives. A paper is published in a scientific journal? Shrug. A paper is retracted? Shrug. It may be interesting, a curiosity, but it's largely irrelevant to the average person. They're not emotionally committed to any of it. The problems occur when professional science somehow overlaps with something that they do care deeply about. And their interaction with that scientific work is not even an attempt to analyze it; rather, they simply want to cherry pick scientific results that agree with their preconceived notions, and use (abuse) scientific authority in order to argue for their preconceived notions.
But independent confirmation is not that difficult to understand. Is Jane lying or telling the truth about a particular situation? If you're skeptical of Jane's claims, then you ask John, someone else you know who also has first-hand knowledge of the situation. Average people can't design a scientific experiment, but they can certainly dig deeper into some question. However, you've got to be motivated to dig deeper. Some people want to be lied to, because the truth would be uncomfortable.
I've never heard of this paper, but I am aware of the judicial capture that pharma companies manage to get for themselves. A whole extra judicial organization to handle vaxx related damages.
That's why I don't trust them. Amongst other things (burgers for vaxxes is an odd choice, speaking charitably).
In that vacuum, some people found independent churches and legacies, and others ended up following woo-woo new age bs, which the Internet organized at scale. We know about the Wakefield study because zealots pushed it hard. Fluoridation is another example - my city recently started it and the council was brigaded by lunatics from all over the world losing their minds over it.
The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.
I think you need to go back further to the education system. I’m a 1990s kid, so I grew up having teachers tell us to “think for ourselves.” In high school, a bunch of our teachers joined the students in protesting the administration over a (completely innocuous) dress code. GenX and millennials were positively marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up. The Joe Rogans of the world are a predictable result of that education.
Would that were true and they were fighting against the system right now...
They were marinated in "Both sides are bad(tm)! The System(tm) is bad. You can protest by dropping out of the system!"
Except that ... doesn't work. "Dropping out of the system" instead advantages both the status quo and those who do actually muster up the energy to fight.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.
> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then
This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.
don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.
Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.
Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.
For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.
That funding could have been used for something that actually advanced our knowledge. And instead it got sucked into the bottomless pit of trying to disprove something claimed by people who aren’t interested in proof.
It’s shocking how often basic science turns up something wholly unexpected and new and weird and interesting.
Edit: To be super clear, I don’t buy the antivax line for a second. Nor did I remotely believe there was a link between vaccines and autism. We know there isn’t. But science means sometimes you investigate what you’re pretty sure you know just to be certain.
A dozen? A thousand?
It’s okay to say “Anti Science”.
But how can you expect to convince doubters when a claim like "no link between vaccines and autism" is made, and all you have to do is click your left mouse button twice to pull up the actual research, and see that what was actually studied was "did a certain amount of increase in aluminum content in vaccines create more negative health effects than the vaccines with the previous aluminum content?". That's what was studied here, that is the source for this article.
Yes, these things are related, but intentionally removing that context and misrepresenting the actual result does not convince people to believe you, it just drives them further away. It's so easy for a reader to see for themselves that the claim that's being made in this case is not remotely what the source research is actually claiming. How does that increase trust?
So while the article’s headline simplifies the finding by saying “no link between vaccines and autism,” it’s not inaccurate. It reflects the key takeaway, that within the vaccines that include aluminum, which are widely used in childhood immunizations, there is no indication of increased risk. That’s important and relevant.
It’s fair to expect transparency, and I agree that people should be encouraged to read the actual research, but in this case it seems to me that the summary is consistent with what the study actually tested and found.
> A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety of Denmark’s childhood vaccination program.
Breaking it down --
1. The study was Denmark specific 2. The study inspected aluminum specifically 3. (Based on reading, it seems to) Reaffirm the findings that the vaccines are safe, conducted / funded by those who set the policy
Here's the actual study: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Note the main researcher is funded by Novo Nordisk: https://researchleaderprogramme.com/recipients/anders-hviid/
And is frequently trying to debunk criticisms of drugs, often with phrasing such as this.
https://www.contagionlive.com/view/hpv-vaccination-does-not-...
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/740704
and the list goes on...
> no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions
It's right in the title, which was omitted on submission.
The concerns the public have are not aluminum, so of course it wont. Should also point out the argument largely made is that the _quantity_ of vaccines, particularly in the US are part of the problem.
Generally speaking, I'd welcome studies on what folks are actually saying. Having friends in both the avid vaccine advocates and the anti-vaccine crowd, I think both are just arguing past each other and not studying stuff rigorously enough to convince the other.
the truly sad part to me is that you could/would have written this before this study. I don't believe that you have evaluated the validity of this study yet, but you feel justified in telling us you've already made up your mind and you don't really believe in the follow through part of the scientific method, instead you're playing the tribe game