Yes, and when I do argue with them it is never to convince them. It is to make sure their arguments lie in tatters so that anyone thinking of listening to their nonsense knows that their position is indefensible. As a bonus they often show a nastier streak than I could ever display. I dealt with Truthers the same way. With being confronted their claims can spread like the diseases they want to run rampant again.
For the reason LSLGuy describes so well in his post above. They are scared and they are drawn to those that fuel their fear.
Firstly, perhaps a useful distinction needs to be drawn between:
- anti-vaxers - people who actively campaign and proselytise against vaccines; and
- non-vaxers - people who don’t vaccinate because they are concerned about vaccines.
Your particular interest has necessarily exposed you to the worst of the anti-vaxers , but I suspect there are a hundred of non-vaxers for every anti-vaxer; people who aren’t nasty or campaigning, but who just hold a particular opinion about vaccination and have not vaccinated accordingly.
And your view just quoted, while obviously true in an objective sense, is ultimately not a useful description of the behaviour (if the aim is to understand or change it) because it’s not true subjectively. If you genuinely don’t think a thing is necessary for public health, or that omitting to do it is going to have bad effects, you are doing something subjectively peaceful. And understanding how your target thinks is necessary if you are going to change how they think.
It’s all very well to talk about a particular view in an abstract manner. I can have a viewpoint about various aspects of parenting including the formula feeding or cloth diapering. But this particular view is different. This viewpoint directly endangers the lives of other people. Measles is so contagious that the unvaccinated have a nine in ten chance of getting it in case of exposure. You don’t want measles. Measles carries a terrible risk of side effects and even potential death for roughly one in a thousand who gets it. Before we had the vaccine, we had a few hundred dead kids each year.
As others have pointed out, it is very hard talk a non-vaccinator or anti-vaccinator into vaccinating. You’re really not going to change how they think because they aren’t thinking. So then we have to turn to a much more important goal: protecting our community from dangerous and infectious diseases. And there’s where I think we can make a difference. We have to make it harder for people to avoid vaccination. Don’t want to vaccinate your kids? The ped will attempt to talk to you. But ultimately you are the one who is going to have to pay the price for your stupidity not our community. I think we need to put up as many walls as possible to protect our kids. This means that anyone who does not choose vaccination without a valid medical reasons will have to homeschool their kids. We should do our best to require medical professionals like nurses to get vaccinated or they can’t be involved in direct patient care.
This movement should be treated like the fringe element it is and laws should be made accordingly. IMO, the California law is the perfect example of the kind of appropriate response here: legal, reasonable and moral.
None of which I disagree with, but none of which is relevant to my point.
I know you’re something of an authority on the issue. Could you point me to maybe two or three published papers that you think both
a) Rigorously establish that there is no link between vaccines and autism
and
(b) Cannot, by rational people, be linked back to pharma funding
Purely so that I have resources to fall back on
Thanks!
Princhester: What’s the difference in the effect on herd immunity caused by non-vaccinators compared to anti-vaccinators?
I am not going to address the ranting and confirmational bias being exhibited here - and there is a lot of it - and I am not defending people who do not have their children vaccinated. I don’t think unvaccinated children without documented medical exemptions should be allowed in public or private schools.
I won’t even mention Sanofi, Novartis, or Hospira.
I will just repeat my belief that aggressive, insulting, and dismissive tones are not conducive to altering the behavior of others.
http://www2.aap.org/immunization/families/faq/vaccinestudies.pdf
Here’s 21 pages of links to studies showing no link between vaccines and autism. I’ll let you examine the funding at your leisure.
Your turn, can you show a single study that demonstrates a link between vaccines and autism?
Here’s a few more to add to Telemark’s list.
This one was just published in April.
The study found:
HTH!
Here’s a huge list of studies debunking all kinds of other anti-vax myths.
So how would you personally convince a hard core anti-vaxer their belief system is both wrong and dangerous? I once spent three days of my life at Mothering.com – internet HQ of the American anti-vax movement. I was polite and backed up everything I wrote there with factual evidence. In turn, I got one nice pm from someone who claimed to be on the fence – and a dozen emails calling me all kinds of terrible names and a banning from admin.
I don’t see much ranting here. I see people frustrated and expressing that frustration. I think that frustration is rather deserved considering that the anti-vaxers are literally helping to bring diseases and kill people.
The problem with (b) is that in the minds of anti-vaxxers, everything is linked to pharma funding. Study was published in JAMA or The Lancet? Those are run by doctors! Big Pharma at work! Study was conducted at the University of Wisconsin? Glaxo gave them three million dollars in 1991! BP!
And so on. The only sources those people will accept are “studies” published in Mother’s Natural Health Weekly and the like.
I once proposed in a paper that community health nurses go out and educate the chiropractors and herbalists and acupuncturists and whatnot, and enlist them in the effort. Since they’re the people (some) antivaxxers are listening to, let’s use them.
But when we’ve got MDs who waffle or agree outright that vaccines are bad, even if it’s a fraction of them, I’m not sure it would be effective. But it’s a strategy I don’t think anyone has tried yet.
That’s pretty brilliant actually. I know there is at least a vocal minority of chiropractors who steer their patients away from (other) woo because they are trying to change the perception of their own field.
There is, has been, and will continue to be tons of resources (online and elsewhere, including forum postings in threads like this one) addressing vaccine concerns in a civil and factual matter.
A small percentage of blog and forum posts in favor of immunization could be seen as uncivil, rude, or even “ranting”.
Sometimes there are posters who are genuinely worried about the manner in which a worthy position is being presented. Then there are those who profess concern about the tone of pro-vaccine commentary, who focus on the rude comments, while ignoring the vast majority of civil and factual pro-vax information out there (and also ignoring the much nastier tone habitually employed by antivaxers). Many times those who claim they were driven away from rationality by pro-vaccine meanies are not being honest with themselves or others.
You run into tone trolls/concern trolls on other issues as well.
A majority meaning 60% in the case of the Forbes cite.
From the above National Institutes of Mental Health cite
I fully support fighting ignorance on vaccination. Please don’t let that work impact actual scientific research on autism or give support to those who want to decrease autism support services.
IANA Princhester, but I’ll take a stab at it.
A non-vaxxer is (ironically considering our topic) like a person with a disease, but who’s non-infectious. A non-vaxxer won’t cause other people to become non-vaxxers.
An anti-vaxxer is like a person with a disease in a very contagious state who’s actively trying to spread it far and wide.
Compare an HIV-positive person who’s monogamous & condom-using, versus an HIV-positive person back in the wild and crazy bathhouse days who was doing everything in his power to infect as many unknowing participants as possible.
It’s very clear the disease dynamics will be very different depending on how many of one or the other we have. Where in this case, the “disease” is non-vaccination. Which is a meta-disease with significant impact on population infection rates for, e.g., measles.
Trying to force non-vaxxers to vaccinate is good for measles prevention as far as it goes. But non-vaccinated kids are just a symptom of the true disease, which is anti-vaxxism and the anti-vaxxed kids they’re raising.
To defeat the underlying disease, anti-vaxxism, we need to take the fight to them; to make it very difficult for them to infect others with their ignorant ideas. In the USA today it’s pretty easy to convert somebody to mainstream Christianism of one form or another. The folks proselytizing for Zeus and Agamemnon are having a harder time of it. If we can make the reception for anti-vaxxism more like the latter than the former we have a hope of stopping this gathering snowball. If not … not.
Smart policy, like smart doctors, treats causes not symptoms.
Here’s a scientific paper that Kolga and I were asked to write by members of the community working on this issue.
Our conclusions?
Thankfully, I do not interact with anyone like those “smart, well educated women.” I’ll leave that to the people who post here who’ve devoted considerable time & effort to explaining vaccination in easily comprehended detail. I’m not a scientist but I’ve had contact with rational people for many years now.
The PBS show you omitted from my post would be a great way to reach those women. There were animations with cute little white cells which smart 5th graders might find condescending–but should be within the grasp of these ladies’ brains. I hope some of them caught the show. I also hope they stop hanging out in crowded playgrounds with their inadequately vaccinated kids–for the sake of those kids & the rest of humanity.
LSLGuy: You make a good point.
My point, however, stands: If a measles outbreak starts, it doesn’t matter if there are X% non-vaccinators or X% anti-vaccinators; if X is large enough that enough kids aren’t vaccinated, herd immunity is gone and can’t protect them or the people who really can’t be vaccinated.
Longer-term, anti-vaccinators are worse. In the immediate term, there’s very little effective difference once the viruses or bacteria start flying.
Hard core anti-vax nut and her latest idiotic reaction to a rational CDC campaign on vaccines. What would you all tell her?
Her? Nothing. She’s a lost cause.
I’d talk to the people around her, who might still be reached.
I’d have a better chance of convincing Ray Comfort of the value of basic modern biology than I would of convincing her of the same. Comfort’s ideology has never directly killed anyone; less cognitive dissonance, ya dig?