To be an anti-vaxxer is to be burdened with several misapprehensions, including, but not limited to:
[ul]
[li]The belief that mommy always knows best, regardless of how dirt stupid mommy happens to be (cf: Jenny McCarthy).[/li][li]That the devil you know (measles) is always better than the devil you don’t (autism), even when it isn’t.[/li][li]That anything big and organised (government, Pharma, etc…) always operates with the worst possible intentions, to the point that they think nothing of poisoning kids for profit.[/li][li]That anything “natural” is, by definition, better than anything artificial, even when it isn’t (cf: cancer, tuberculosis, Poison Ivy etc…)[/li][li]The Dunning-Kruger effect.[/li][/ul]
That’s a pretty powerful list of thinking traps and irrational biases to overcome, even when debating a person who holds only a couple of them. A common acceptance of point 3, above, makes them particularly difficult to convince. You can show them a thousand studies clearly proving that vaccines don’t cause autism, but since they’re all run by mainstream scientists (a.k.a. - hapless tools of “Big Pharma”), you might as well show them a card trick.
All this is complicated further by the fact that (a) most anti-vaxxers genuinely do love their kids, and (b) most anti-vaxxers (indeed, most people generally) are absolutely terrible at accurately calculating risk, especially when dealing with something over which they have no control. For instance, why are so many people scared of flying but not driving, even though driving is far more dangerous? Well, I think it’s mostly down to the fact that a driver is easily able to maintain an illusion of control. It is an illusion, of course, because it doesn’t really matter how good a driver you are if you’re surrounded by bad drivers, but that doesn’t matter. The illusion of control is a powerful one. By contrast, when you’re in a plane, you have absolutely zero control, and if something goes badly wrong you’re pretty much fucked. Aviation authorities can cite safety statistics until the heat death of the universe, but to someone whose real fear stems from a lack of control, they’re just a bunch of hollow, empty numbers.
The same is true for anti-vaccinationists. When faced with the threat of a measles epidemic, such a person can reassure themselves by using anti-bacterial wipes in the kitchen, or making sure little Jimmy always washes his hands, or whatever. But what can you do to minimise the threat that your kids MMR jab will give them autism? Absolutely nothing. The anti-vaxxer has already decided that vaccines DO cause autism (point 5, above) and they’ve already decided that everyone in authority who says otherwise has been compromised (point 3), and they approach the question burdened by a vast overestimation of the virtues of “mommy wisdom” (point 1), so they’re pretty well entrenched in their ignorance. Throw both a genuine love for their children and a pathological fear of being out of control into the mix, and you’ve got someone who is pretty well impervious to reason.
What I’m trying to say is that the outlook for conquering anti-vax quackery is pretty bleak. There have been anti-vaxxers for as long as there have been vaccines, and the internet has only made the problem worse and it will likely continue to do so. I fear we just have to live with that. Education is of limited value when most of the people you’re trying to educate have already decided that the educators have an ulterior motive.
Given all this, you might expect me to be in favour of mandatory vaccination. If these people’s lazy thinking renders them more or less incapable of making easy, responsible medical decisions for their kids, surely the sensible thing to do is just override them. However, I think that’s a terrible mistake, and here’s why: Vaccinations are not 100% safe. They’re 99.9999 (add as many 9’s as you like) percent safe, but not 100% safe. This is hardly a point against vaccines, of course, because nothing in real medicine is 100% safe. Anaesthesia isn’t 100% safe, aspirin isn’t 100% safe, cough syrup isn’t 100% safe. But these things aren’t the subject of any controversy. Ridiculous as it is, vaccines just are hugely controversial. And sadly, I fear that a great many people, perhaps even the majority, are susceptible to the fallacies that make anti-vaxxers so intractable, it’s just that, for most people, this susceptibility is counterbalanced by an appropriate respect for the expertise of doctors. Make vaccination mandatory, and the publicity engine that drives the anti-vax movement will ensure that each legitimate vaccine injury (and, of course, everything that even looks like it might be a vaccine injury) will become a cause célèbre for the movement. This will result in a further erosion of respect for authority among the general public. The net result? More anti-vaxxers.
Of course you might well say “The anti-vax movement are trying their best to do that right now”, and you’d be right. However, their bullshit arguments and scaremongering will be far more persuasive, and more palatable to the general public, if the government mandates vaccination, for one simple reason: People really, really don’t like having other people telling them how to raise their kids, especially when it comes to medical decisions. This goes double when the person telling them what to do is Uncle Sam. In a nation where “Do you trust your government?” is a de facto campaign slogan for one of the two main political parties, it seems likely that mandatory vaccination will make the old anti-vax canard that the government is in Pharma’s pocket far more persuasive. Every vaccine injury that makes the papers (and the increased controversy alone would guarantee they made the papers) would erode the trust that many people - people who might otherwise be content to choose to vaccinate - have in their doctors and legislators. Net result, as I said, more anti-vaxxers.
TLDR version: I think it will all backfire and make the problem worse.