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Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. Now of course the scientific position has (rightly) chan

Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. Now of course the scientific position has (rightly) changed, but we have to explain when it wasn't correct before, and is broken now. When I talk to my relatives, they remember when vaccinations were dangerous, when we switched from "global warming" to "global cooling", and now to "climate change" which lets science claim any old change as forwarding their cause. To be clear, I side with science on this, but for people who don't follow science all the time, I can see how it's easy to get tired of the "no, we have the right answer now, ignore that previous answer". See also basically everything to do with eating/fats/etc. LATER EDIT: I was not clear in this post. By "science which told them" on the first line, I meant to say "The version of science as portrayed by much of the media". The media blew the autism/vaccine issue hugely, and kept the controversy going for a long time.

ceejayoz 12y ago
> Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. It really wasn't. One doctor with an enormous conflict of interest told them, and all other evidence both then and now contradicted his claims.
- DanBC 12y ago
  The crook Andrew Wakefield had a paper published in a respected peer-reviewed journal. That paper was reported by a variety of journalists - sometimes real science journalists in respectable mainstream quality newspaper. Normal not-idiot doctors started offering single vaccines instead of MMR. Please be aware of the hindsight fallacy. Looking back now - now we know he had developed his own single measles vaccine and had been paid to find flaws with the MMR vaccine for a lawsuit and we know he took samples without permission and falsified data - now it's easy to say "oh but it's all nonsense!" It really wasn't that easy at the time. That's why many of the people who declined MMR didn't reject all vaccination - they took seperate vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella.
maxerickson 12y ago
The doctor who published the paper positing a vaccine autism link was a fraud that has been stripped of his license to practice medicine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield That's the publication process failing to catch the fraud, not science being wrong. I guess there are probably other things that happened, but that one person is a source of an awful lot of the nonsense we see today.
krschultz 12y ago
Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. Now of course the scientific position has (rightly) changed, but we have to explain when it wasn't correct before, and is broken now. That's 100% false. The scientific consensus has always been that vaccines are safe and effective, and do not cause autism. One individual paper that said otherwise was an outlier, and was relatively quickly debunked. It's important to differentiate between a single paper written by a scientist, and the scientific consensus, which is what the bulk of scientists agree is right. It's not that the consensus is never wrong, but it is wrong a lot less often than a individual paper is wrong. The consensus on vaccines has never changed and to desribe it as such is misleading.
- CJefferson 12y ago
  Sorry, I should probably have put science in quotes, or more particularly, many media outlets suggested that science believed that vaccines were dangerous, and caused autism. In general the media made the process of the debunking much more confusing than it had to be.
mgamache 12y ago
This is exactly the right answer. The lack of credibility of science has provided a foothold for anyone with a plausible idea and good marketing. The "science" that we see today in the common press is just not a reliable source of information. Between academic fraud, cherry picking results, governments failed oversights no one can tell truth from fiction so it's back to our biological dispositions.

ceejayoz 12y ago

> Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. It really wasn't. One doctor with an enormous conflict of interest told them, and all other evidence both then and now contradicted his claims.

DanBC 12y ago
The crook Andrew Wakefield had a paper published in a respected peer-reviewed journal. That paper was reported by a variety of journalists - sometimes real science journalists in respectable mainstream quality newspaper. Normal not-idiot doctors started offering single vaccines instead of MMR. Please be aware of the hindsight fallacy. Looking back now - now we know he had developed his own single measles vaccine and had been paid to find flaws with the MMR vaccine for a lawsuit and we know he took samples without permission and falsified data - now it's easy to say "oh but it's all nonsense!" It really wasn't that easy at the time. That's why many of the people who declined MMR didn't reject all vaccination - they took seperate vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella.

maxerickson 12y ago

The doctor who published the paper positing a vaccine autism link was a fraud that has been stripped of his license to practice medicine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield That's the publication process failing to catch the fraud, not science being wrong. I guess there are probably other things that happened, but that one person is a source of an awful lot of the nonsense we see today.

krschultz 12y ago

Except it was science which told them vaccinations were dangerous and caused autism in the first place. Now of course the scientific position has (rightly) changed, but we have to explain when it wasn't correct before, and is broken now. That's 100% false. The scientific consensus has always been that vaccines are safe and effective, and do not cause autism. One individual paper that said otherwise was an outlier, and was relatively quickly debunked. It's important to differentiate between a single paper written by a scientist, and the scientific consensus, which is what the bulk of scientists agree is right. It's not that the consensus is never wrong, but it is wrong a lot less often than a individual paper is wrong. The consensus on vaccines has never changed and to desribe it as such is misleading.

CJefferson 12y ago
Sorry, I should probably have put science in quotes, or more particularly, many media outlets suggested that science believed that vaccines were dangerous, and caused autism. In general the media made the process of the debunking much more confusing than it had to be.

mgamache 12y ago

This is exactly the right answer. The lack of credibility of science has provided a foothold for anyone with a plausible idea and good marketing. The "science" that we see today in the common press is just not a reliable source of information. Between academic fraud, cherry picking results, governments failed oversights no one can tell truth from fiction so it's back to our biological dispositions.