For the most part the anti nuclear weapon protests were financed by the USSR, since it disbanded so did the anti nuke protests.
How is that relevant, unless what the OP is asking about is not people’s overall opinions about science/technology developments, but merely which of them happen to be hot-button issues of the moment?
I don’t deny that the objections to vaccines promulgated by a vocal minority are getting much more media attention these days than objections to nuclear weapons. But the fact remains that when you look at the overall status of popular opinion, people in general are much more approving of vaccines than of nuclear weapons.
:dubious: Cite? AFAICT this conspiracy-theory claim is complete bullshit.
Soviet defectors claim its true per Wiki:
Plausible, but not at all the same thing as the claim that US antinuclear protests were crucially dependent on Soviet funding, which is what the previous poster seemed to be suggesting.
Things might get kinda sticky if a vaccine for covid-19 is ever developed.
I think Wendell Wagner covered that well in his post #32 and I fully concur. Taking the first two in particular (I have no strong opinions on the latter two) I occasionally shop at a grocery that in my view is much superior to Whole Foods and generally at least as expensive if not more so, but it has absolutely nothing to do with anything being “organic” and everything to do with high quality and uniqueness. Their meats and fish are generally superior to what I’d find in even a high-end grocery store, often uniquely and beautifully marinated, and their deli and prepared foods sections contain many wonderful things you’d find nowhere else. That’s why I shop there, though I’m not rich enough to do it regularly or often. There’s nothing “unscientific” about that. I don’t go to farmer’s markets very often but when I do it’s because the wide variety of usually fresh high quality produce and other items makes it interesting.
This tends to be true for beliefs that are falsely perceived as “controversial” by some significant minority of the public, and the false controversy is typically driven by either economic factors (the pandemic quarantine, climate change mitigation) or religious ones (evolution, abortion rights, the nature of the cosmos). These falsehoods are propagated both by ignorant media in the guise of “balance” and, worse, by media that is deliberately deceptive in support of vested interests, and further amplified by the plague of fake news on social media. Things like beliefs in medical quackery or fear of vaccines is just some combination of ignorance and paranoia fueled by the same sources. The US now has a president who lies constantly, habitually, and routinely, and apparently without consequence.
New Scientist magazine, in its cover story in the issue for the week of October 29 - November 4, 2011, talked about this phenomenon in the context of climate change denial, under the cover heading “Unscientific America: A dangerous retreat from reason”. People do generally tend to trust science if they have no personal stake in the matter, but it’s amazing how much personal interests distort the beliefs of otherwise rational people.
“Traditional” medicine describes naturopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic etc. - which involve traditional remedies that are hardly ever discarded no matter how useless or even harmful they’ve been shown to be. Mainstream medicine on the other hand is constantly revising its approach based on new evidence, while discarding (sometimes reluctantly) outmoded traditional therapies.
Off my soapbox. OK, back on briefly.
It’s looking that way. Some thought antivaxers might hunker down out of public view given the prospect of a life-saving and pandemic-ending Covid-19 vaccine. Instead, they seem to have been energized.
We can’t trust scientists until they stop shifting our paradigm.
Chiropractic, for instance, is not that old. I’d call traditional medicine the use of herbs and such, some of which even work. “Alternative” is the accepted name for such crap.
Unfortunately, all too true. Statistics and pointing to evidence about vaccines being safe doesn’t work very well. I’ve found that a good answer to the “it’s just measles, why risk a vaccine” crowd is to tell them that 110,000 people died of measles world wide a few years ago. That shuts them up. The easy to grasp spread of measles in Disney helped get California’s law getting rid of personal exemptions passed. Highlighting anti-vaxxers suffering and dying from Covid-19 will help more than assurances of safety.