I remember reading an article somewhere by a public health researcher on why parents choose not to vaccinate. The gist of her point was that most parents who ch

I remember reading an article somewhere by a public health researcher on why parents choose not to vaccinate. The gist of her point was that most parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids believe that they have the financial and other resources to manage the illness in the tiny chance their kids do get it, so they don't think it's worth the "potential downside". I recall the same article also pointing out that the majority of voluntarily unvaccinated kids are in middle/upper class families. Based on this, I'd attribute the phenomenon to three causes: 1. People have forgotten how bad these diseases can be. Measles will really mess you up, but today's parents were born in the 80's and 90's, they don't remember measles. 2. On the flipside, they do remember scaremongering about autism and mercury. Autism has been especially prevalent in the public memory because we've only recently started to understand it better. 3. Naturopathic/homeopathic remedies have really taken off in the past few years. Humans have a fundamental comformation bias problem. When you want to believe that a remedy is working, you tend to believe that it's working. Humans suck at remembering to consider the null hypothesis. So my interpretation is that they know that autism is incurable, and they think it's a risk in the single percentage points as a consequence of the mercury in vaccines. However, they know nobody with measles, so they think of it as a zero probability to get a disease like a more serious flu (curable). Who wants to make that tradeoff? I think that train of thought is so wrong it's not even wrong, but you can't be condescending if you intend to persuade.