34 ms·

How Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Took Hold in the United States

67 points by mhb 7y ago

adolph 7y ago
“We ask parents in the first two years of their child’s life to protect them against 14 diseases, that most people don’t see, using fluids they don’t understand,” Dr. Offit said. “It’s time for us to stand back and explain ourselves better.” The last paragraph is the whole article.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  The whole anti-vax thing started in the UK. I went to school in the UK and we spent a lot of time talking about how horrible some of these diseases were and how we can be thankful for vaccination and antibiotics. It's more of a media thing IMHO: the media love scandals because it generates a lot of viewers. What better than a scandal involving your defenseless babies to drive those $$$?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    In fairness, that initial fraudulent study was all over the media, and it did appear to show a real link between MMR and autism. Of course it did, he was faking the figures with intent to deceive. The media and public reaction was, initially, entirely understandable. Particularly where few remember how bad measles and the rest can affect the unvaccinated. It necessarily took time to disprove and strike-off Andrew Wakefield. What I fail to comprehend is that now he's no longer allowed to call himself Dr, he is permitted to spread his lies in the US. Somehow he has managed to become and remain something of a personality doing so.
    - radicalbyte 7y ago
      Good point, he was a doctor who had release a groundbreaking study so it was pretty rational to get worried about it. On a tangent: what has your post been down-voted? It's a good well reasoned reply to my comment. It should be getting up-votes.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        shrug Someone didn't like my opening sentence I guess. The first down landed in a second or two - far too fast for someone to have read all. :D
_red 7y ago
This article is mainly pro-pharma propaganda. Not because its “pro-vaccine”, since vaccines themselves are very useful medical tools. It’s that it frames the issue that “any questioning of the 25 vaccine schedule orthodoxy means you are an anti-science religious whack job” It’s fine to be both pro-vaccine, without feeling the need to purchase the whole Merk lifetime subscription catalog.
jjuhl 7y ago
Why are people so STUPID? Why would you A) not protect your child from harmful disease by vaccination. B) Put other people at risk by reducing herd immunity. Why? Fuck, I hate humanity.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  This is the simply the result of the US education system. You reap what you sow as a country, but it's a tragedy that defenseless children will be the ones who bare the brunt of it.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    I agree! It's the gradual dumbing down of the populace that is one of the primary causes. Someone asserted a link to autism from vaccines and then the whole thing took like gasoline on a fire.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    Not necessarily, this is the result of many things combined. Social media made it super easy to spread lies and misinformation. You could have a broken education before, but without the means to distribute your lies, your impact on society was small. Also Hollywood celebrities are the biggest contributors to anti-vaccination sentiment. https://jezebel.com/heres-a-fairly-comprehensive-list-of-anti-vaccination-c-1714760128 https://jezebel.com/heres-a-fairly-comprehensive-list-of-ant...
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      No. Social media is an extension of ourselves. Better education stops lies, not censorship - which is the only viable alternative to fake news and come with all the obvious pitfalls.
  - _red 7y ago
    Should "undocumented immigrants" be vaccinated? How could that be achieved?
softwaredoug 7y ago
Part of the problem with trust in the medical community is how inconsistent doctors themselves can seem. I’m on my 6th doctor (2nd urologist) and finally I think I have a diagnosis for a long standing issue. Every doctor has a different opinion or way to treat what I have. Some of it is because the science is actively evolving. But a lot of it is because doctors themselves have their own opinions about the science based on their own anecdotal experiences treating patients. Eventually I have to go with the doctors opinion that “feels right” to me. I know vaccines fall in a seemingly “obvious” category, but when my experience is fairly typical, I can understand the frustration with being told to take the doctors opinion as gospel.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pcmaffey 7y ago
To understand this perspective better, step back and ask yourself how much do you trust the US healthcare system and pharmaceutical industry to have your best interests as it’s top priority? Given everyone’s various degrees of lack of trust in a highly corrupt and inefficient system, it’s perhaps easier to see how people “throw the baby out with the bathwater” when it comes to understanding science & medicine relative to the industries that profit from their corrupt establishment. If you don’t trust the messenger, how can you trust the message?
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Or is it more about being corrupted by false information on social media? I know some anti vaxxers and it feels charitable to them to say its because they analyzed and studied healthcare and therefore mistrust its vaccines. Rather, the occams razor is that they are just wrong and misled. They got into anti vax propaganda on FB or elsewhere, its straight misinformation, feeling of parental superiority, and conspiracy thinking. Given they hold numerous false views about vaccines like risks with autism and arsenic, its clearly bad information that is virally infecting people via social media. And downvoted for disagreeing civilly, have to love it, is this reddit?
  - dmix 7y ago
    I find it weird how everyone wants to blame social media for all of our problems. Like there wasn't dumb pseudoscience and conspiracies being spread constantly and fringe political groups before Twitter. I have a feeling it's because it's an obvious change so everyone blames the surface level platforms (like they blamed TV and video games in the past). Which then offers them an easy "solution" to censor our way out of them as a panacea and then they can blame the tech companies and regulators and politicians for not “doing something” to make humans less dumb. Editorializing hundreds of millions of people’s daily thoughts and opinions on our way to utopia!
    - JeanMarcS 7y ago
      I think it’s more about speed. The speed of spreading information, true or false, in social medias. And sadly my own experience suggests that false informations spread way faster.
spaginal 7y ago
It's the grouping, amount, frequency, and unsolved health issues around early childhood issues such as SIDS and autism that freaked parents out. The fact that the only answers to the questions and concerns is to employ shaming tactics is not compelling or rational enough to push parents with major concerns into doing it. The medical communities modus operandi of "we have a drug or pill for that", especially around opioids for instance, has created distrust amongst a lot of people also that had recent interactions with doctors. It is kind of a perfect storm of issues in my opinion.
lovemenot 7y ago
This article hints at, but doesn't fully articulate, the irony of two apparently very different disciplines applied upon each other. Vaccine-resistance, as a mental-state looks akin to the immune system, which normally confers disease immunity but, when running amok can trigger allergies. It is implied that some medical sociologists now consider vaccine-resistant thinking as a kind of allergy to benign societal forces and are planning a social vaccination program to eradicate such wrong-headedness. As an aside, the word meme was used near to its original sense - as Dawkins defined it - in the last chapter of his classic "The Selfish Gene".
gumby 7y ago
If these people fear Big Pharma shouldn’t they believe that vaccines are a blow against the “man” because every prevented disease prevents Big Pharma from selling medication?
zby 7y ago
I have observed a case here in Poland - the parents refused a vitamin K shot to their baby because they found something in the leaflet. Later it turned out that this particular vitamin K was not approved in Poland for normal use, only for urgent cases - but still was used routinely on newborns by the hospitals because there was no other. Of course the parents were called crazy anti-vaxxers - but who is there to read the leaflets and check the doctors if not the parents? Parents can be ignorant - but they are more reliable to have their children interest as their main objective then any institution. In communism times, and probably generally in the past, the institutions like hospitals were much more authoritarian, and in my family there is a personal story about how horrific it sometimes was. Of course doctors don't like being checked. Now vaxination is a kind of shibboleth - something you need to agree with, and agree quickly and automatically, to be admitted to the 'enlightened' society. I think the hysteria around anti-vaxxers is the worst thing.
- orwin 7y ago
  Well antivaxxer in France caused the death of at least one child in 2016 (who could not get vaccinated because of a weak immune system). They might be other cases. Does the responsibility of murder dilute when enough people is involved? At this school were this happened, the only antivaxxers who showed guilt were the ones whose children will have sequela. I know its not possible, but let those antivax live in the same communities and develop their own immunity w/o vaccines. Or at least, when a kid can't get vaccinated, let his parent know if the school is safe.
- DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "particular vitamin K was not approved in Poland for normal use". Was it the dosage? Because Vitamin K is Vitamin K, so I'm not sure I follow why this would be bad. In the US, the FDA allows doctors to prescribe any approved drug for any need. So called "off label" use of drugs is common. The only issue is sometimes insurance will not cover the costs. As for the mistrust of medical professionals, I cannot fathom what it was like to live in a society that blindly followed the State without data to support the position--that must be horrible. Fortunately in the developed, modern world, the data is free for everyone to look at and decide for themselves. Here is a nice review with references showing just how amazing vaccines are: https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/graphic-proof-that-vaccines-work-with-sources-61c199429c8c https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/graphic-proof-that-vaccin... I think part of the reason 'enlightened' society requires everyone to be vaccinated is herd immunity. Not everyone can take a vaccine and be protected, so it's up to the majority of society to protect them. Granted, this is another discussion of who's responsible for taking care of whom, but in modern developed societies we have agreed as a majority to help the less fortunate. An example here are small children, people undergoing chemotherapy, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems. These are the people that vaccine herd protection protects. I'm sorry you feel the hysteria around anti-vaxxers to be the worst thing. I can imagine how difficult it must be to feel better informed than the masses and everyone to think you're the fool. Numerous people throughout history have been murdered for speaking truth to the masses because what they were saying was not convenient.
slv77 7y ago
When our kids were born our pediatrician who was from Germany mentioned that the US vaccine schedule was accelerated compared to Europe. The reason was that parents here are more likely to just stop bringing their kids in for scheduled checkups at some point and the accelerated schedule somewhat compensated for that. In addition pharmaceutical companies don’t or won’t coordinate so there are fewer combo vaccines and more shots than necessary. So take a new parent who’s surging with oxytocin and vasopressin; give the parents only one choice (vaccinate or don’t); and then stick a needle in their kid. Then repeat that the next visit but with multiple shots. Hmmmm... yep it is the internet... How about this: - Create two vaccination schedules to provide parents choice - Force vaccine providers to package vaccines to reduce the number of shots - Eliminate vaccines at birth when parents hormones are surging - Centralize tracking of vaccinations to reduce the burden on parents who move between health care providers because of changes in insurance - Offer in-home checkups and vaccines for at-risk groups that you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise
- hhas01 7y ago
  So what you’re proposing is to increase the period in which unprotected infants may be exposed to dangerous diseases, just to pander to a bunch of noisy know-nothing narcissists? The CDC et al already tried placating those malevolent turds by removing a perfectly safe preservative from vials (increasing the cost and risk of those vaccines to everyone), and the only thing that happened was those messianic loons and malignant grifters took that “goodwill gesture” as a validation of all their egomaniacal bullshit, and so doubled-down on their screeching and lies in return. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-still-dont-cause-autism/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-still-dont-cause-a... Here’s a much better idea: how about taking each one of those new parents for a good long walk around every nineteenth-century graveyard in town, and count up all the gravestones under which little kids lie, from a time when even in a “first-world” society endemic diseases killed one in ever two or three before adulthood, and tell all thpse blessedly ignorant modern-day parents of yours to grow the fuck up.
freejulian85 7y ago
The government can’t even protect us from a known carcinogen - RoundUp. And we’re suppose to just trust them when it comes to vaccines and their side effects? Most anti-vaccine people I know don’t doubt it protects from a specific virus. They question the side effects and secondary impacts vaccines can cause to the body. Just like there’s no doubt that RoundUp is an effective pesticide — but that’s not the issue, is it?
- freejulian85 7y ago
  Sorry, my comment must not conform to the hackernews groupthink. If you think some vaccines don’t have significant side effects, you’re also not very smart (as so many comments are stating anti vacciners are).
aaron695 7y ago
Just look at the vitriol and bullying directed to anti vaxxers. Every second week there's a joke on Reddits front page about un-vaccinated kids dying, directed to parents. It's not even a top issue of preventable deaths of children https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-death https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-dea... but somehow it's treated as such. Look how our world created this monstrosity and you'll see how the world created the increase in anti vaxxers (Which is still kinda small, like .9% changed to 1.5%). Personally I think Twitter, it's the seeds that sprout in other social media like FB. But it'd be interesting to see numbers. This is something you could track across countries and time. We need to pin down what communication methods do what. Small bites of info tend to be very toxic and easy to produce.
xvilka 7y ago
Easy to solve. Just bill antivaxers for the moral and economical consequences of every outbreak. That will teach them a lesson.
- ianai 7y ago
  Some antivaxers are doing it because they’d can’t afford medical care...
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Well, of course, there are exceptions - medical or financial reasons. But this is a minority, and I doubt these are spreading this brain plague.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Getting measles is cheaper than getting a shot? Even uninsured, I'm sure you could call the doctor and work out a low or no cost solution.
    - ianai 7y ago
      That’s not the context the decision is being made within, I’m afraid.
t_mann 7y ago
Anti-vaccers always make me think of things like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis I'm by no means a biologist, so I have no idea how much substance the idea has, but it seems to me like the existence of anti-vaccine mindsets in general should provide an evolutionary advantage for many strands of germs.
poilcn 7y ago
We almost don't have these anti-vaxer folks here, but it seems to me that people who spread hate towards them are incomparably more worse. It's like a hate cult. People buy whatever the media sell them and start to harass any group they were told to hate and fear, actually giving these groups growth.

67 points by mhb 7y ago

“We ask parents in the first two years of their child’s life to protect them against 14 diseases, that most people don’t see, using fluids they don’t understand,” Dr. Offit said. “It’s time for us to stand back and explain ourselves better.” The last paragraph is the whole article.

radicalbyte 7y ago
The whole anti-vax thing started in the UK. I went to school in the UK and we spent a lot of time talking about how horrible some of these diseases were and how we can be thankful for vaccination and antibiotics. It's more of a media thing IMHO: the media love scandals because it generates a lot of viewers. What better than a scandal involving your defenseless babies to drive those $$$?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  In fairness, that initial fraudulent study was all over the media, and it did appear to show a real link between MMR and autism. Of course it did, he was faking the figures with intent to deceive. The media and public reaction was, initially, entirely understandable. Particularly where few remember how bad measles and the rest can affect the unvaccinated. It necessarily took time to disprove and strike-off Andrew Wakefield. What I fail to comprehend is that now he's no longer allowed to call himself Dr, he is permitted to spread his lies in the US. Somehow he has managed to become and remain something of a personality doing so.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    Good point, he was a doctor who had release a groundbreaking study so it was pretty rational to get worried about it. On a tangent: what has your post been down-voted? It's a good well reasoned reply to my comment. It should be getting up-votes.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      shrug Someone didn't like my opening sentence I guess. The first down landed in a second or two - far too fast for someone to have read all. :D

_red 7y ago

This article is mainly pro-pharma propaganda. Not because its “pro-vaccine”, since vaccines themselves are very useful medical tools. It’s that it frames the issue that “any questioning of the 25 vaccine schedule orthodoxy means you are an anti-science religious whack job” It’s fine to be both pro-vaccine, without feeling the need to purchase the whole Merk lifetime subscription catalog.

jjuhl 7y ago

Why are people so STUPID? Why would you A) not protect your child from harmful disease by vaccination. B) Put other people at risk by reducing herd immunity. Why? Fuck, I hate humanity.

cameronbrown 7y ago
This is the simply the result of the US education system. You reap what you sow as a country, but it's a tragedy that defenseless children will be the ones who bare the brunt of it.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  I agree! It's the gradual dumbing down of the populace that is one of the primary causes. Someone asserted a link to autism from vaccines and then the whole thing took like gasoline on a fire.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Not necessarily, this is the result of many things combined. Social media made it super easy to spread lies and misinformation. You could have a broken education before, but without the means to distribute your lies, your impact on society was small. Also Hollywood celebrities are the biggest contributors to anti-vaccination sentiment. https://jezebel.com/heres-a-fairly-comprehensive-list-of-anti-vaccination-c-1714760128 https://jezebel.com/heres-a-fairly-comprehensive-list-of-ant...
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    No. Social media is an extension of ourselves. Better education stops lies, not censorship - which is the only viable alternative to fake news and come with all the obvious pitfalls.
- _red 7y ago
  Should "undocumented immigrants" be vaccinated? How could that be achieved?

softwaredoug 7y ago

Part of the problem with trust in the medical community is how inconsistent doctors themselves can seem. I’m on my 6th doctor (2nd urologist) and finally I think I have a diagnosis for a long standing issue. Every doctor has a different opinion or way to treat what I have. Some of it is because the science is actively evolving. But a lot of it is because doctors themselves have their own opinions about the science based on their own anecdotal experiences treating patients. Eventually I have to go with the doctors opinion that “feels right” to me. I know vaccines fall in a seemingly “obvious” category, but when my experience is fairly typical, I can understand the frustration with being told to take the doctors opinion as gospel.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pcmaffey 7y ago

To understand this perspective better, step back and ask yourself how much do you trust the US healthcare system and pharmaceutical industry to have your best interests as it’s top priority? Given everyone’s various degrees of lack of trust in a highly corrupt and inefficient system, it’s perhaps easier to see how people “throw the baby out with the bathwater” when it comes to understanding science & medicine relative to the industries that profit from their corrupt establishment. If you don’t trust the messenger, how can you trust the message?

Dumblydorr 7y ago
Or is it more about being corrupted by false information on social media? I know some anti vaxxers and it feels charitable to them to say its because they analyzed and studied healthcare and therefore mistrust its vaccines. Rather, the occams razor is that they are just wrong and misled. They got into anti vax propaganda on FB or elsewhere, its straight misinformation, feeling of parental superiority, and conspiracy thinking. Given they hold numerous false views about vaccines like risks with autism and arsenic, its clearly bad information that is virally infecting people via social media. And downvoted for disagreeing civilly, have to love it, is this reddit?
- dmix 7y ago
  I find it weird how everyone wants to blame social media for all of our problems. Like there wasn't dumb pseudoscience and conspiracies being spread constantly and fringe political groups before Twitter. I have a feeling it's because it's an obvious change so everyone blames the surface level platforms (like they blamed TV and video games in the past). Which then offers them an easy "solution" to censor our way out of them as a panacea and then they can blame the tech companies and regulators and politicians for not “doing something” to make humans less dumb. Editorializing hundreds of millions of people’s daily thoughts and opinions on our way to utopia!
  - JeanMarcS 7y ago
    I think it’s more about speed. The speed of spreading information, true or false, in social medias. And sadly my own experience suggests that false informations spread way faster.

spaginal 7y ago

It's the grouping, amount, frequency, and unsolved health issues around early childhood issues such as SIDS and autism that freaked parents out. The fact that the only answers to the questions and concerns is to employ shaming tactics is not compelling or rational enough to push parents with major concerns into doing it. The medical communities modus operandi of "we have a drug or pill for that", especially around opioids for instance, has created distrust amongst a lot of people also that had recent interactions with doctors. It is kind of a perfect storm of issues in my opinion.

lovemenot 7y ago

This article hints at, but doesn't fully articulate, the irony of two apparently very different disciplines applied upon each other. Vaccine-resistance, as a mental-state looks akin to the immune system, which normally confers disease immunity but, when running amok can trigger allergies. It is implied that some medical sociologists now consider vaccine-resistant thinking as a kind of allergy to benign societal forces and are planning a social vaccination program to eradicate such wrong-headedness. As an aside, the word meme was used near to its original sense - as Dawkins defined it - in the last chapter of his classic "The Selfish Gene".

gumby 7y ago

If these people fear Big Pharma shouldn’t they believe that vaccines are a blow against the “man” because every prevented disease prevents Big Pharma from selling medication?

zby 7y ago

I have observed a case here in Poland - the parents refused a vitamin K shot to their baby because they found something in the leaflet. Later it turned out that this particular vitamin K was not approved in Poland for normal use, only for urgent cases - but still was used routinely on newborns by the hospitals because there was no other. Of course the parents were called crazy anti-vaxxers - but who is there to read the leaflets and check the doctors if not the parents? Parents can be ignorant - but they are more reliable to have their children interest as their main objective then any institution. In communism times, and probably generally in the past, the institutions like hospitals were much more authoritarian, and in my family there is a personal story about how horrific it sometimes was. Of course doctors don't like being checked. Now vaxination is a kind of shibboleth - something you need to agree with, and agree quickly and automatically, to be admitted to the 'enlightened' society. I think the hysteria around anti-vaxxers is the worst thing.

orwin 7y ago
Well antivaxxer in France caused the death of at least one child in 2016 (who could not get vaccinated because of a weak immune system). They might be other cases. Does the responsibility of murder dilute when enough people is involved? At this school were this happened, the only antivaxxers who showed guilt were the ones whose children will have sequela. I know its not possible, but let those antivax live in the same communities and develop their own immunity w/o vaccines. Or at least, when a kid can't get vaccinated, let his parent know if the school is safe.
DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "particular vitamin K was not approved in Poland for normal use". Was it the dosage? Because Vitamin K is Vitamin K, so I'm not sure I follow why this would be bad. In the US, the FDA allows doctors to prescribe any approved drug for any need. So called "off label" use of drugs is common. The only issue is sometimes insurance will not cover the costs. As for the mistrust of medical professionals, I cannot fathom what it was like to live in a society that blindly followed the State without data to support the position--that must be horrible. Fortunately in the developed, modern world, the data is free for everyone to look at and decide for themselves. Here is a nice review with references showing just how amazing vaccines are: https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/graphic-proof-that-vaccines-work-with-sources-61c199429c8c https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/graphic-proof-that-vaccin... I think part of the reason 'enlightened' society requires everyone to be vaccinated is herd immunity. Not everyone can take a vaccine and be protected, so it's up to the majority of society to protect them. Granted, this is another discussion of who's responsible for taking care of whom, but in modern developed societies we have agreed as a majority to help the less fortunate. An example here are small children, people undergoing chemotherapy, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems. These are the people that vaccine herd protection protects. I'm sorry you feel the hysteria around anti-vaxxers to be the worst thing. I can imagine how difficult it must be to feel better informed than the masses and everyone to think you're the fool. Numerous people throughout history have been murdered for speaking truth to the masses because what they were saying was not convenient.

slv77 7y ago

When our kids were born our pediatrician who was from Germany mentioned that the US vaccine schedule was accelerated compared to Europe. The reason was that parents here are more likely to just stop bringing their kids in for scheduled checkups at some point and the accelerated schedule somewhat compensated for that. In addition pharmaceutical companies don’t or won’t coordinate so there are fewer combo vaccines and more shots than necessary. So take a new parent who’s surging with oxytocin and vasopressin; give the parents only one choice (vaccinate or don’t); and then stick a needle in their kid. Then repeat that the next visit but with multiple shots. Hmmmm... yep it is the internet... How about this: - Create two vaccination schedules to provide parents choice - Force vaccine providers to package vaccines to reduce the number of shots - Eliminate vaccines at birth when parents hormones are surging - Centralize tracking of vaccinations to reduce the burden on parents who move between health care providers because of changes in insurance - Offer in-home checkups and vaccines for at-risk groups that you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise

hhas01 7y ago
So what you’re proposing is to increase the period in which unprotected infants may be exposed to dangerous diseases, just to pander to a bunch of noisy know-nothing narcissists? The CDC et al already tried placating those malevolent turds by removing a perfectly safe preservative from vials (increasing the cost and risk of those vaccines to everyone), and the only thing that happened was those messianic loons and malignant grifters took that “goodwill gesture” as a validation of all their egomaniacal bullshit, and so doubled-down on their screeching and lies in return. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-still-dont-cause-autism/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-still-dont-cause-a... Here’s a much better idea: how about taking each one of those new parents for a good long walk around every nineteenth-century graveyard in town, and count up all the gravestones under which little kids lie, from a time when even in a “first-world” society endemic diseases killed one in ever two or three before adulthood, and tell all thpse blessedly ignorant modern-day parents of yours to grow the fuck up.

freejulian85 7y ago

The government can’t even protect us from a known carcinogen - RoundUp. And we’re suppose to just trust them when it comes to vaccines and their side effects? Most anti-vaccine people I know don’t doubt it protects from a specific virus. They question the side effects and secondary impacts vaccines can cause to the body. Just like there’s no doubt that RoundUp is an effective pesticide — but that’s not the issue, is it?

freejulian85 7y ago
Sorry, my comment must not conform to the hackernews groupthink. If you think some vaccines don’t have significant side effects, you’re also not very smart (as so many comments are stating anti vacciners are).

aaron695 7y ago

Just look at the vitriol and bullying directed to anti vaxxers. Every second week there's a joke on Reddits front page about un-vaccinated kids dying, directed to parents. It's not even a top issue of preventable deaths of children https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-death https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-dea... but somehow it's treated as such. Look how our world created this monstrosity and you'll see how the world created the increase in anti vaxxers (Which is still kinda small, like .9% changed to 1.5%). Personally I think Twitter, it's the seeds that sprout in other social media like FB. But it'd be interesting to see numbers. This is something you could track across countries and time. We need to pin down what communication methods do what. Small bites of info tend to be very toxic and easy to produce.

xvilka 7y ago

Easy to solve. Just bill antivaxers for the moral and economical consequences of every outbreak. That will teach them a lesson.

ianai 7y ago
Some antivaxers are doing it because they’d can’t afford medical care...
- xvilka 7y ago
  Well, of course, there are exceptions - medical or financial reasons. But this is a minority, and I doubt these are spreading this brain plague.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Getting measles is cheaper than getting a shot? Even uninsured, I'm sure you could call the doctor and work out a low or no cost solution.
  - ianai 7y ago
    That’s not the context the decision is being made within, I’m afraid.

t_mann 7y ago

Anti-vaccers always make me think of things like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis I'm by no means a biologist, so I have no idea how much substance the idea has, but it seems to me like the existence of anti-vaccine mindsets in general should provide an evolutionary advantage for many strands of germs.

poilcn 7y ago

We almost don't have these anti-vaxer folks here, but it seems to me that people who spread hate towards them are incomparably more worse. It's like a hate cult. People buy whatever the media sell them and start to harass any group they were told to hate and fear, actually giving these groups growth.