If I were to accept this analysis, I might have been more charitable in my response.
But the reality is that she already knew how to make a good choice: after the measles outbreak:
Did she say what kind of approach would have worked on her?
Larry Wilmore on the Nightly Show had vaccination as a topic a few weeks ago. At the end, as part of his Keep it 100% real segment, he asked a panelist who was pro-vaccinations if she would vaccinate the kids of anti-vaxxers if she could get away with it. Her response, I felt, just keeps a lot of people on the fence still on the fence. She said she wouldn’t and that it was the parents choice.
Excuse me? Endangering other people SHOULD not be anyone’s choice when it comes to established science like vaccinations. People who are on the fence would have looked at that and thought they were right for making the decision not to vaccinate. If the panelist had said she would have done it by force, that would have expressed what a one-sided medical debate that was and gotten the point across better
Oh there are words, just not for this forum.
But if she had said she would have done it by force, that would have validated the point of view that antivaxxers are being persecuted and get those tinfoil hats on a bit snugger.
I was persuaded through education. But most studies show that a single chat and the talk of community benefits of vaccination actually REDUCE intent to vaccinate. Education about personal benefits increases intent to vaccinate just slightly. Which is better than nothing.
It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more states do away with personal and/or religious exemptions for school. I suspect there will be a small uptick in homeschooling, and a much larger one in vaccination. I suspect a lot of people who don’t vaccinate do so because it’s easy to not vaccinate. Make it more difficult, and they’ll whine about their rights, but vaccinate anyway.
In my mind, there are two main categories of antivaxxers. There are the ringleaders, who are more invested in winning the argument and showing them than they are in actually being right and helping children; these are the people harassing dead kids’ parents because their existence is a detriment to their arguments.
However, that type is quite rare. The vast majority of antivaxxers are what you could call “sheep” if you were feeling angry, but who are basically just well-meaning, concerned parents. This article explains the mindset quite well - as the mother said, she thought that there couldn’t be all that smoke without a fire. She panicked about what was best for her children, and just froze.
The second type can be converted, either when their kids get sick, or somehow some science permeates their skulls. The best way to get to them would be to really push the fact that by doing this, they could kill their own children. There’s no hope for the first type.
Sounds like the opening to a particularly satisfying Twilight Zone episode . . .
Short version: They’re lazy and stupid.
The position of a lot of anti-vaxxers is that these diseases (measles, pertussis, etc.) aren’t as dangerous as people think, particularly since we have better palliative care now, and it’s extremely rare for someone to die of one of them, so someone who did must have had an underlying condition-- or the family is lying. This is why they are demanding to see medical records.
It’s kind of like when AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore, who was HIV+, and refused to take AZT during her pregnancy, and then later breastfed her daughter, only t have the child die of AIDS pneumonia at age three was furious at the ME for putting AIDS and pneumocystis on the child’s death certificate, and insisted that the kid died of an allergic reaction to an antibiotic-- insisted right up until she died a couple of years later, when she was still in her 40s.
I seriously had someone argue to my face that measles is no big deal, because, there was that episode where the Brady kids all had it at once, and they were just kinda sick for a couple of days, then they were fine. When I pointed out that it was a fucking TV show, this person said yes, but it was made back when the measles was still prevalent, so people should have known what it was like. :there is no suitable smiley:
I have less faith than you that talking will convince people, but I guess you are a living example of why I should try. I will still fantasize about vaccinating their kids by force though
One reason, probably not the only one, may be the recent trend in encouraging the belief that an opinion has merit simply by being held. You are a special snowflake and so am I.
Yes - but I don’t expect lawmakers to take any serious action until there are more and larger outbreaks, resulting in deaths and permanent horrific disabilities.
Significant commercial air safety improvements don’t seem to have occurred until planes crashed.
It’s them damn “chemicals” and GMOs, don’t you know!
There are lots and lots of things that we compel people to do even though a reasonable, informed person would otherwise comply willingly on his or her own. Fuck a bunch of special snowflakes when it comes to vaccinations.
It amazes me how many people think they have a right to their beliefs, but don’t want others to have the same right. The first rule of law is “You have a right to your own beliefs. You do not have a right to your own facts.”
If I were dictator, before people could get a license to have children, they would have to read accounts of all the children who were born, say, in 1900, died of these childhood diseases that we vaccinate against. And Christian Scientists could never get a license. Think of it as evolution in action. Even when I grew up, there was still polio.
Still wouldn’t convince some of them alas.
Polio also still around alas.
Shot@Life (confession I do volunteer work for them) is a great organization dedicated to helping fund four vaccines for poor kids including the one for polio. If people want to protest, you can donate to them as against a way of sticking it to the anti-vaxers.
They’re also looking for volunteers to help out on campaigns and spread awareness of this issue to others.
Ironically enough, Christian Scientists teach that children should be vaccinated, and then the family should pray away any side effects or adverse events.
I was shocked to learn that, too.
One sect of the Dutch Reformed Church is the only “normal” church that has a clear religious prohibition against vaccines. (I hate using the word normal, but I can’t think of another word that means Abrahamaic/Buddhist/something your grandmother would consider a “real church”. There are some Neopagan and Wiccan churches that have vaccine objections written in their bylaws, but they’re generally not written as forbidding vaccines, but supporting individual choice to vaccinate or not.)
Seriously. One of the most offensive myths promoted by the anti-vaxxers is that “The Amish” don’t vaccinate, and don’t have autism.
First of all, many Amish groups do vaccinate, and I don’t mean Mennonites, I mean Amish. The prohibition on modernism isn’t axiomatic: it has to do with being idle, and thereby making oneself a tool of the devil. Avoiding vaccine-preventable diseases means more hands free for the barn-raisings.
As far as not having autism, there aren’t numbers, just like there aren’t numbers of lots of things, like CP, but you can teach an autistic person to bale hay and pick apples, it just takes more time and more supervision. People get diagnosed with autism in school, and the whole Amish schooling system is different. Low-functioning autistics are probably just people who don’t talk, and aren’t differentiated from retarded people, while high-functioning people whose deficits are mostly social have different lives in a rigid society like an Amish community than they would in the larger US society.
But I’ve read reports of doctors who made regular visits to Amish communities, usually because they had a patient with something like brittle diabetes, or a high-risk pregnant patient, and they observed people they would have referred for autism if they’d seen them anywhere else.
Now, the communities that don’t vaccinate probably have the exact same rates of autism, although I can’t prove it, but it’s beside the point, because we have volumes of research showing that vaccinations have nothing to do with autism.
Everything I’ve read tends to imply that parental age has a lot to do with it, and I’m guessing the Amish tend toward getting married very early relative to people in American society at large.
This would make me wonder if maybe the anti-vaxxers are drawing incorrect conclusions, especially in light of the fact that many Amish groups DO vaccinate.
The anti-vaxers protesting the proposed law in California made a big deal of threatening to home school. Then they realized that most of them couldn’t home school (having both parents working, etc.) and it became an issue of the unfairness of nit letting their kids in schools without being vaccinated. So I suspect the home schooling uptick will be very small.
It is very tempting to go to Sacramento with signs saying “Anti-Vaxers are Child Abusers.”
All right, the next round of chemtrails is going to include the DPT vaccine. That’ll show 'em who’s boss…