If your aim is to protect children by increasing the numbers of vaccinated children it's important not to use mockery or ridicule. Those are the wrong tools.
When education fails, when facts fail, when logic and reason fail, you're left with mockery and/or ridicule.
Totally cool with it. It's fun, and gives you a smug feeling that is unfortunately also fun. But I don't let myself think I'm doing anything other than throwing in the towel in trying to help this other inhabitant of our rock.
Once I frame it that way to myself, I find myself either continuing to try or completely ignoring the other person.
Emotional influences like skepticism, fear, frustration, and community seem to be the main drivers for not vaccinating your kids. It may be that the best way to combat that sentiment is through emotions. Maybe it takes tactics similar to anti abortion groups? Should we be standing in communities with big posters of dead kids?
Interesting that you picked abortion as an example. Those placards of gruesome images - do they change anyone's opinion? Or do they strengthen existing viewpoints? The people who are anti-abortion see the images and can't understand how anyone could want an abortion afterwards. People who are pro-choice see the placards and think the pro-life people are viciously anti-woman.
There is a group in the middle who might be swayed, but those people can be reached with calm language. In this analogy the placard-wielders are the "anti-vaxxers".
I guess I'm trying to say that mockery and ridicule are using emotion to try to change behaviours, but they create the wrong emotions and are counter-productive. We want people to feel welcomed, understood, supported, etc, while we're trying to change their mind.
" Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree. "Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl. "I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a nigger. "I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name. It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree. The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field. "Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly. "Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child. The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children. And so, social progress was made. "
There are broadly speaking three groups of people.
i) those who get vaccinations
ii) those who are unsure
iii) those who are anti vaccination
People sometimes assume that the people in group ii and in group iii and are deluded idiots who ignore all the evidence. Let's look at a real example of mass non-vaccination -- the MMR Autism hoax.
This involved a real but corrupt scientist who wrote a scientific paper but used faked data and published that paper in a respected medical journal, although they later withdrew it. That's not people believing in Unicorns! That's people thinking there's some scientific reason not to get that vaccination. Newspapers with their terrible reporting of science fed that fear. When the paper was retracted by the journal people don't know if that's because it's true but there's a technicality, or if it's false. At the point people were not aware of Andrew Wakefield's criminal corrupt behaviour.
Now try putting yourself in their position. Remember that Wakefield is still a scientist at that point; that although the paper is retracted you didn't know about the faked data. You have a bunch of your friends worried about whether they should get that vaccine or not, or whether they should get single vaccines instead of MMR. There are starting to be conflicting stories in the newspapers. And then, a group starts a website and members of that group start calling you a fucking idiot for even considering not vaccinating your child. They compare you to flat earthers and Yeti-watchers and alien abduction kooks. You know you're not like that, so already you've started to reject what they're saying. Some of your friends are sympathetic to you, reinforcing your doubts with phrases like "maybe there's nothing to it, but look at Bob - he was fine, he got the vaccine, and now he's Autistic" or "maybe there isn't anything to it but measles isn't that bad and do you really want to risk Autism" (and remember weak anecdotal evidence is rife on HN; and at least on HN user has suggested that measles isn't that serious).
I believe that mockery here pushes people away from information about vaccination and towards misinformation.
This example is tricky because of "hindsight bias". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
This is the best document about the crook Andrew Wakefield - http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html
You might say that if you focus the mocking on group iii that people in group ii would want to avoid them. I think that people in group ii would feel themselves to be the target.
Also don't forget that people are not rational even when they claim to be. There are a bunch of areas where the science is very much clearer than in the early days of MMR (climate change) and you still have denialists who trot out arguments created by shills paid by a few large companies - the same shills that were used by the tobacco industry using the same tactics that delayed smoking controls for so long.
Those later generations are easier to vaccinate if they haven't been subjected to years of mocking.