Non-vaccination for any reason other than medical reasons (like the decision you made for your kid) IS making decisions about the health care of other people’s children. People who don’t vaccinate for stupid reasons are putting other people’s health at risk by increasing the chance that vaccine preventable illnesses will return.
The problem is that you’re not always aware if a child has a disease is infectious before the child gets sick. Diseases have incubation periods where you may not have symptoms but you can be contagious.
Vaccines don’t prevent all vaccine preventable diseases. You can have outbreaks of whooping cough. But the vaccine will help reduce the frequency of outbreaks and often reduce the symptoms of the disease even if a vaccinated person still gets sick.
My daughter’s ped is from India. You should hear what she thinks of parents who don’t vaccinate for non-medical reasons. She’s told about the cases of polio she’s seen the ugly aftereffects of measles. I would dare say that most parents who come here from countries where vaccination is less common are profoundly grateful for the availibility of vaccines. They’ve certainly seen the aftereffects of non-vaccination more than the average spoiled middle class mommy blithely reading Jenny McCarthy’s latest idiot rant.
Why?
Thanks to the lunacy of disgraced anti-vax British doctor Andrew Wakefield, England had a needless measles outbreak.
There have been recent shortages of all kinds of vaccines including the Hib.
Yeah your kid just got the annoying cough. Problem is that babies with the same thing can and do die and blowing that off with a “it happens” when it is a very preventable event is unacceptable. Many kids in that center get exposed, and because the vaccine is not 100% effective, a few of them catch it. They bring it home. Expose baby sister. Expose the extended family, the aunts and uncles with waning immunity because they haven’t been vaccinated since they were 11, who expose their infant boys and girls. Some of them doge it, some get seriously ill, some die … but hey, “it happens”.
No it isn’t “like they can hurt you or your children” - it is exactly that they can hurt your children.
About the nutjob aspect per se: I think the nutjob position isn’t as stupid as others are making it out to be. I’m confident that it’s flat out wrong, but not so sure that only nutjobs can take it.
There are plenty of examples of misinformation campaigns by the authorities. Bloodletting was mainstream. McCarthyism (the Joe kind, not the Jenny kind) was mainstream. The campaigns against marijuana (e. g. “Reefer Madness”) and LSD (e. g. chromosome damage) were authoritative. The involvement of Iraq in the September 11th attack was fairly clearly stated by the highest authorities there are in the USA. And this year, though most authoritative sources that say Obama is a U. S. citizen, “birthers” can still point to plenty of authorities including a few members of Congress that support their movement.
The challenge is to correctly identify which information campaigns are right and which are misleading. Few of us have direct access to the basic information or personally know people who do. Few of us have technical training in some of the relevant fields. Once one tends toward a certain position, the amount of confirmatory input available is overwhelming compared to what our brains evolved to handle.
So for a variety of reasons I don’t think correctly identifying all the misinformation campaigns is to be taken for granted among reasonable people.
In fact in a group of the size writing in this thread, some will probably disagree about my other examples of misinformation.
I can sort of see Napier’s point in a sense. The internet is not necessarily a haven a good information. A well done website can easily fool people.
For example, take the website of the National Vaccine Information Center. This looks pretty professional, right? It seems trustworthy. Nothing screams made for adsense or badly put together blog.
And yet this site is filled with lousy information the subject. The NVIC is run by Barbara Loe Fisher who is an evil moron.
Let’s not forget the justifications made for believing in every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike - "The Government has done it before. Remember MK Ultra! Remember the Tuskegee Experiment! (or the “Tuskegee Airmen”, as a more than usually uninformed conspiracy theorizer put it on the Dope awhile back).
Napier is correct that not only nutjobs believe the crank theories hurled about concerning vaccination, but it does take both a conspiratorial mindset and a deficiency in critical thinking skills to believe the basics - that vaccines are harmful, unnecessary and part of a Big Pharma/Government plot to cause illness/enrich themselves/whatever.
With vaccination, we’re not talking about defunct hundreds of years-old medical practices or political shenanigans. It’s been a hugely successful long-term public health initiative with documented success in vastly reducing or even eliminating dangerous diseases, backed by extensive research and clinical experience and involving many distinguished and dedicated researchers and clinicians. Giving the Jenny McCarthys and Barbara Loe Fishers equal weight because “you can’t trust Them” is not a valid form of skepticism.
I think the best strategy in response to antivaxery remains good education (including teaching critical thinking skills in schools), prompt responses to rumormongering and holding the media and politicians accountable for protecting our health through continued support of vaccination). That, and publicity about disease outbreaks caused by vaccine refusal will hopefully keep the antivaxers’ potential for doing harm to a minimum.
I did a bunch of research and posted this description of common diseases that are routinely vaccinated against a couple of years ago. It’s a long read, but I think it’s worth it- most people have never seen any of these diseases, and really have no idea why vaccines were developed in the first place. It wasn’t just on a lark; babies, children, and adults were dying nasty deaths on a routine basis.
Never mind the kids, I worry about MY health - every time we have a family gathering with kids, I seem to come down with a cold. I’ve had every vaccination that was required - 40 years ago. Next time I see my doctor, I’m going to ask him about some boosters, if people are going to be stupid and not vaccinate their little disease carriers.
Beyond the measurable harm they are doing to public health, they are making life even tougher for the parents of autistic kids. In addition to the drain on finances, energy, and hope that goes along with raising these kids, they also get to deal with comments ranging from well meaning but stupid, to rather vicious:“I guess you won’t be vaccinating your next kid!”
It blows my mind to think that someone has actually said that to you - that is so far past acceptable. My response would probably be something like, “I already have an autistic kid; I don’t also need a dead one from a preventable disease.”
That’s not what I meant by “basic information”, though I didn’t pick a very good term for what I meant. I mean the information at the base of the story. Generally things get to the library and the Internet through an uncertain number of steps along the way, a provenance, that we’re not really in a position to question.
Researchers who study vaccines and autism, for example, have direct access to the basic information. They don’t have to base their beliefs just on indirect or secondhand information. But I don’t know anybody in the field, and I’m gonna guess that if I went to a library I could find books on both sides of the “debate”.
Suppose you wanted to understand the genetics of intelligence, and you go to the library. You’d find lots of books by, or referencing, Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt. He was a moving force in the field for decades. He WAS the authority. And he had direct access to the information. Unfortunately, he lied about what he knew. Others have the option of trusting him, or reproducing his work, or picking somebody else to trust, or acknowledging they don’t really have the standing to form a good opinion. In his particular case, the story got blown wide open, which gives us the further option of distrusting him because we trust the main body of reporting that outed him. But when some of us were in school he would have been the best information and distrusting him wouldn’t have been a very sensible option.
I will concede the point about the Internet. I trust all the things I find on it. Well, except the ones I wrote…
Yes, I agree with your post, and want to emphasize that I am entirely in favor of vaccination, and think the vaccine = autism crowd is completely wrong and doing a great deal of harm (though one hopes misguidedly and not intentionally). I only mean to point out that there’s a pretty big gap between “a conspiratorial mindset and a deficiency in critical thinking skills” and “nutjob”. Moreover, I propose that there are quite a few conspiracies out there, though typically not the ones that attract a lot of fanfare. I base this on reading newspapers and history. In fact I think it would take a deficiency in critical thinking skills to NOT wonder about conspiracies, though one should reach the conclusion that there’s a real conspiracy pretty infrequently.
Though, I did just have to send in a rebate form for new tires, so my conspiracy sensors are probably a bit touchy right now…