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From the anti-vaxers I've talked to, it's not so much the fear mongering, it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives. Smart people es
by aeternus 7y ago
From the anti-vaxers I've talked to, it's not so much the fear mongering, it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives.
Smart people especially know that it's relatively easy to lie with statistics and to generate studies with subtle selection bias.
If your premise is that most/all modern scientific studies are funded by drug companies and therefore cannot be trusted, then being anti-vax is still a stretch but you can at least see how it could be rationalized. Especially given the rich history of money suppressing/biasing scientific studies in the past: smoking, asbestos, j&j baby powder, round-up, etc.
- bitL 7y agoAsk any pro in their profession what do they think about newspaper articles from their own area of expertise. Now where do most people get information about areas they aren't working in? If it's that bad in paid journalism, how much worse is it when you expand your source of information to Reddit, YouTube autoplay etc.?
- guelo 7y agoI hear this a lot but this website right here is full of professionals reading news articles about their area of expertise and besides the occasional accusation of sensationalism most articles are treated as accurate.
- manicdee 7y agoBecause we have been conditioned to accept that journalists use the wrong facts or incorrect values when reporting about something and we automatically correct the context and semantics.
- wtallis 7y agoMainstream press gets details wrong all the time; when I read newspaper and magazine articles about a subject I'm very familiar with, I can usually identify some misunderstanding or oversimplification or other mistake. But I can't recall any instance of encountering mainstream media getting something so egregiously wrong as to be comparable to mixing up "vaccinate" vs "don't vaccinate". Nor have any of the health care professionals I know ever disputed the pro-vaccination consensus as reported by the press.
- skolos 7y agoMy perception was that vaccines are not really big profit centers, so their studies should not be tainted by money - no?
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- apr 7y agoSay what? The global vaccine market was over 30 Billion dollars in 2018. This is the most lucrative pharma market because you are medicating the whole population including healthy people, no other medication can top that. Not only that, but in the US the pharmaceuticals are shielded from liability for vaccines in stark contrast to any other medication type. How's that not a profit center?
- URSpider94 7y agoYou are confusing revenue and profit. Vaccine companies historically don’t make much profit, especially when compared to pharmaceutical companies who make and sell drug compounds.
- apr 7y agohttps://investors.merck.com/news/press-release-details/2019/Merck-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2018-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://investors.merck.com/news/press-release-details/2019/... $6.2B income in 2018.
- lkbm 7y agoUh....you just responded to someone saying "most of the profits aren't from vaccinations" with the profit for an entire company that provides everything from cancer treatments to diabetes medications to also everything else. They did call out Gardasil as a major cause of the increase in profits from the previous year, but it wasn't 6.2B by any stretch of the imagination.
- mc32 7y agoSo how do they explain away the USSR (which I presume is understood not to have operated under similar economic incentives)? They also believed in vaccination and did vaccinate their population. Were they complicit in a world-wide cross economic-system conspiracy to get everyone vaccinated? I think these people are constructing a made up excuse to excuse themselves.
- weberc2 7y ago> Especially given the rich history of money suppressing/biasing scientific studies in the past: smoking, asbestos, j&j baby powder, round-up, etc. This is enumeration fallacy, and those are the exceptions, not the norm. Economic incentives work for the public good far more often than not.
- electriclove 7y agoThis! Plus the fact that one can't question studies/motivations/priorities without being labelled as a crazy anti-vaxxer.
- mikeash 7y agoI can kinda sorta see that for new vaccines. But old vaccines like measles and polio? Those scourges are demonstrably defeated by the vaccines. That’s what really drives me nuts about this. People lined up to receive these miracle cures. Devastating common diseases became near myths. All of this happened within living memory. And we’re to believe that it’s all a conspiracy by big pharma?
- teh_infallible 7y agoI think it’s this (skepticism that big-pharma funded studies can be legit) plus a reaction to the intensity of the aggressive push to vaccinate. (My friend put it to me this way- The government wants me to vaccinate my kids, but doesn’t want me to have public health insurance, paternity leave, etc. If they really cared about health, why are they not pushing vitamins or organic vegetables?)
- InitialLastName 7y ago> If they really cared about health, why are they not pushing vitamins or organic vegetables ... Because there's no evidence that consumption of multivitamins or organic vegetables has any communal or individual health benefits?
- Chris_Chambers 7y agoDon’t use condescending ellipses and sassy question marks. This isn’t reddit.
- RandomInteger4 7y agoCan we please stop it with this "Organic vegetables are better than normal vegetables" nonsense? Seriously, I can't even tell you how many times I've heard that BS as an excuse for why these mother forkers out there say they can't afford to eat healthy, and I'm saying this as a poor very fit person myself. You don't need to eat organic vegetables to eat healthy. You just need to eat vegetables, period, full stop, hold the phone, stop the presses, etc.
- mc32 7y agoVaccinations are really low-hanging fruit. Even severely underdeveloped economies get their pops vaccinated. It staves off mass pandemics. And it costs so little to prevent so much. I really can't understand these kinds of absurd arguments.
- sigstoat 7y ago> My friend put it to me this way- The government wants me to vaccinate my kids, but doesn’t want me to have public health insurance, paternity leave, etc. If they really cared about health, why are they not pushing vitamins or organic vegetables? vaccines are a (roughly) one-time cost. you can be vaccinated faster than you can eat an organic carrot, and with wildly less infrastructural overhead than paying for everyone's health care. the benefit : cost ratio for vaccines is astronomical compared to the benefit : cost ratio of any of those other things, even if they had the benefits ascribed to them.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI used to spend time in an online antivax community because it was a good source of alternative health info. Some members had Phds and we're published authors. Most people there had very negative personal experiences with vaccines. Either themselves or one of their children had a serious reaction. It's known that some people have serious reactions. This isn't something made up by anti-vaxxers. But the current climate gets people with real problems treated as nutters who simply don't have a real medical issue. When I was growing up, we counted success in terms of how many people got vaccinations, but there was no expectation it would ever be 100 percent. Now, we act like we "failed" to get 100 percent when we quote stats rather than counting the high percentage of vaccinated as a big success. I think the root cause of the antivax movement is probably that we are leaving no room for those edge cases who have a genuine problem with vaccines, medically speaking. Those edge cases -- those people for whom this is a real problem -- seem to have concluded that the only way to protect their own right to choose is to make antivax the default norm instead of pro vax. It's probably doomed because vaccines have proven to be beneficial to society as a whole. But if it is clear in your own mind that vaccines are a threat to your life, it readily becomes a hill you are willing to die on, so to speak. I'm neither antivax nor pro vax. I think vaccines have their uses, but we need room for those edge cases to have the right to choose. I get vilified by both camps because neither can tolerate a moderate position, which suggests to me they are both basically equally crazy. A reasonable person is aware that exceptions exist and that you have to have a system that makes allowances for that reality.
- aeternus 7y agoThose that have serious real issues with vaccines are the ones that rely on herd immunity so it is quite counter-productive for them to work towards making anti-vax the norm.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThis assertion contradicts the comment by you that I replied to, which asserts reasonable doubt can exist in people who aren't fundamentally nutters concerning the value of vaccines. I agree with your previous comment.
- kibwen 7y ago> it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives. The fallacy, of course, being the idea that only scientific studies are susceptible to perverse economic incentives, and that people pushing anti-vax narratives can't possibly be trying to sell you anything. I have a hard time ascribing this mentality to mere healthy skepticism when it smells more like anti-intellectualism disguised as anti-establishment rhetoric.
- gumby 7y ago> From the anti-vaxers I've talked to, it's not so much the fear mongering, it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives. I would call that the equivalent of fear mongering because pharma companies don't make much or any on vaccines, and the US government had to even pass a special liability law in order to keep vaccines being made.
- masonic 7y agopharma companies don't make much or any on vaccines On many, they do. Look at HPV vaccine marketing, for example.
- _bxg1 7y ago"it's not so much the fear mongering, it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives." It's fear that fuels that distrust and places the burden of proof on the pro-vaccine side. A rational person, unmoved by emotion, would see that there's far more reason to trust vaccines than to not. It's not irrational to say there's some reason to scrutinize medical industry studies, but in the case of vaccines there's also overwhelming evidence that they work. Fear turns that small case against the studies into a foregone conclusion which must be disproved, instead of simply the side with less supporting evidence. And it's much harder to disprove something than to provide greater evidence to the contrary.