New survey: Most people aren't afraid of vaccines

They’re not Anti-Vaccine.

They’re Pro-Disease.

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Ugh. This seems like a weird off-shoot of degree inflation. No, you don’t need a college degree in the sciences to understand such a basic concept in biology. Herd immunity is something you can explain in a few sentences. It’s much simpler than the concepts covered in a non-college prep high school biology class, much less the sort of science classes required for admission to college, or required of college undergraduates as breadth requirements.

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I don’t think that it’s necessarily degree inflation, but coming from a soft science background (though I work in tech) I could see how they would see some taught by academia to argue but not understand these concepts.

A pro-disease stance has some scientific validity; the species as whole (not to mention the rest of the ecosystem that’s being crushed by the ever increasing tonnage of human flesh) benefits from selection. But you could also describe anti-vaxxers as pro-choice, if you wanted to. It’s accurate. They have no moral or ethical obligation to the proponents of “herd immunity” since they put themselves at equal or greater risk. Saving or prolonging every single human life possible isn’t really a moral imperative, is it? What is death, that one should fear it so? Maybe they (correctly) see overpopulation and human activities as a greater threat than plague? The Black Death created the modern world by making feudalism unsustainable, according to some, at least.

I was forcibly vaccinated as a child in elementary school, as was common in that day. I had my children vaccinated, although I personally set up the vaccination schedule and chose the vaccines based on research, rather than using the medical-industrial complex’s profit-maximizing choices. But I respect the rights of social dissidents and appreciate the value of a control population, so I don’t care if you don’t vaccinate. Pro-disease, anti-medicine, or “for the good of the species”, I don’t care… I’m against the crushing of dissent, though, and nobody owes me a disease-free community. And also I find the arguments against antivaxxers are usually mean-spirited, selfish and self-righteously derogatory, so they never convince anyone, including me.

Obviously my view is unpopular with both kinds of extremists; I’m way out on another axis entirely. But I suspect I might speak for a silent majority who oppose coercion or recognize that the internal combustion engines of vaccinated humans create more suffering and death than antivaxxers medical practices do. In the absence of a major global epidemic, I think most people will respect choice.

Interesting, I can respect that.

The thought process that leads to somebody realizing that having an unvaccinated control group is is a viable one, I agree there is a logic behind it.

I can also agree that personal freedom is a valuable thing.

That being said, while I’m fine with the idea of an individual choosing not to get vaccinated themselves, I can respect the though process behind it.

However, not vaccinating CHILDREN is another matter entirely. We’re not supposed to ‘own’ children to the point where we’re allowed to recklessly endanger them, and the thought process behind the decision of most anti-vaxxers’ decisions to not vaccinate their children is generally more akin to reckless endangerment.

So let’s call it ‘pro-child endangerment’, we’re just lucky there are so few of them. Children shouldn’t suffer because their parents are acting like idiots.

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If someone genuinely sees that as such a threat, let them fight it either through birth control or by euthanizing people. Because as horrible as the latter seems to me, it’s kinder than letting for random children painfully drown in their own lungs. Anybody who sees the kind of pointless torture disease deals out and supports it as a way to keep humans in check has absolutely failed in terms of morality, thank you.

How does that work? It’s not ok to drive double the speed limit just because you stand an equal or greater chance of killing yourself as bystanders. It’s not ok to pollute our common air just because you are also stuck breathing it. And it’s not ok to destroy herd immunity just because you, or more likely your children, would also suffer for its absence.

Freedom of choice shouldn’t means you get to take unnecessary risks for other people. In cases where we do allow that, it’s generally because it also actually creates the freedom to do a lot more things, or because society is being too stupid to deal with it properly - the overproliferation of internal combustion engines you like to bring up having some aspects of both.

If you want to deal with the stupid parts of that, I am with you, and if you want to consider what kind of choices people should be allowed, I will listen. But if you want to pretend that spreading fatal diseases is anything someone might prefer without being despicably cruel, you are nothing but wrong, and are on your own.

Maybe that’s what you mean by self-righteously derogatory; for my part, I can’t imagine any contempt greater than saying it’s moral to let kids die miserably because there are enough of them. The only reason plague is less threatening than overpopulation is how much we’ve done to remove that threat.

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Let’s not forget people of all ages going through chemo.

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Yep.
Figure 11. Political outlooks and risk perceptions.

A different popular claim attributes concern over vaccine risks to a left-leaning political orienta-tion. “Vaccine hesitancy” is, on this account, held forth as the “liberal” “anti-science” analog to “con-servative” skepticism about climate change (e.g., Green 2011). The survey results suggest that this position, too, lacks any factual basis. In contrast to risks that are known to generate partisan disagreement generally—ones relating to climate change, drug legaliza-tion, and handgun possession, for example—vaccine risks displayed only a small relationship with left-right political outlooks. The direction of the effect, moreover, was the opposite of the one associated with the popular view: respondents formed more negative assessments of the risk and benefits of childhood vaccines as they became more conservative and identified more strongly with the Republican Party
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Yep. I’ve been guilty of it enough myself, that I know how thoroughly unconvincing it is. If you want peaceful change, you have to try to be less aggressive and more persuasive…

Once we tried to kill all the wolves; and once our unction was baptism, but now it’s vaccination. What will tomorrow’s deeply held conviction be, that we will force the unbelieving to accept “for their own good?”

Ah yes. Trying to carry out a well-supported strategy to make it so that nobody ever has to see their child paralyzed by polio again is just like trying to force a made-up religion on people. Because both are cases people thought they were doing the right thing, it only makes sense to treat them as equivalent, not a sophistic way to side-step whether there are real differences in cost and benefit.

I care a lot about freedom, Medievalist, but to me that means freedom to do things. My perspective comes from knowing people who would not have had the choice to do anything but rot, save lucky medical intervention, from a disease that could be gone by now. I don’t think the freedom almost lost here, to make what you want of your life, is inherently outweighed by the freedom of others to make benefit-free choices that endanger that.

Your answer to this has been to ask if death is really such a thing to fear. Well, sure, we all die soon or late; but when people say not to fear it, they usually mean death after a life well-lived, or a heroic death, or so on, not a child twisting and suffocating on phlegm. You criticize my words as too harsh to be persuasive, but I could stay here shouting insults for a year, and I don’t think it could match the disdain for other people in that argument. If you’re going to stand by it, you can please drop the tone trolling.

Should people be forced to vaccinate? I think it depends on the risks of doing it, the social costs of making it mandatory, and the risks and social costs of not doing it. Those are all questions that could be considered. But the idea that it’s only imperative to worry greatly about the evil of requiring people not to endanger others, and optional to care about torture visited on the helpless and weak? That’s a caricature of “freedom” robbed of everything that makes the concept worthwhile.

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I agree with the second sentence of your last paragraph; the only difficulty is the age-old “who decides” question common to all such problems. I wouldn’t trust anyone with a True Believer mindset or a completely emotion-based argument to decide. Crusaders scare me more than disease does.

I lost a friend while going through chemo because we were discussing the dangers of the flu that season and she mentioned that no one in her family had been vaccinated for anything. I looked at her in horror and said “you know I’m going through chemo, right?” She just looked at me blankly. I told her my family had to avoid being around her family for the duration of the process. She still looked at me blankly, not understanding why that would be.

Freedom to kill me is not really freedom, at least not for me.

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Much better argument (although the final accusatory note weakens its persuasiveness) but be careful - that same argument can be easily extended to justify permanently quarantining you due to the existence of bubble people. You don’t want to explicitly posit that your own vulnerabilities are grounds for the suppression of others’ freedoms, that’s a really bad idea. Stick with the concept that antivaxxers will cut themselves off from their friends in need - that’s a strong persuasion.

I hope you did educate your former friend, and I hope she is vaccinated now.

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This is what you get when people don’t study science but believe in woo-woo and also believe that ‘Mother Gaia’ will take care of everything.

I was thinking last night that I might be OK with people refusing to vaccinate their children so long as they also agree to permanently quarantine themselves and their children in their house for the rest of their lives.

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I wasn’t exactly at my most chipper, so expending energy to explain the basics of vaccines was beyond my ability at that moment. And of course she didn’t magically become convinced that vaccines are medically useful and safe just because I pointed out that she could have put me in the hospital or even killed me. The fact that her choice had ongoing potential negative consequences for others at her workplace, her children’s schools, grocery stores, etc. was unimportant to her.

In many east Asian countries, people voluntarily wear face masks when they are out in public if they know they have a cold or are otherwise feeling under the weather. That seems a much more positive, responsible, and thoughtful personal choice to make, rather than knowingly spreading germs in the name of personal freedom.

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Are you aware that the pollution that you personally will cause to be pumped into the atmosphere during your lifetime (from your car, your home furnace, the creation of the computer that you are using to talk to me, etc. etc. etc.) may kill more people than any single anti-vaxxer’s actions ever will? Are you even capable of considering that as a possibility, or are you going to reject the idea out of hand because it contradicts your image of self?

Antivaxxers are a scapegoat. We’re all contributing to evil, but some of us like to pretend that we’re better than ignorant people who don’t understand what their best medical options are, as we scarf down our rainforest-destroying UnHappy Meals.

Carp, now I’m being self-righteous too. Sorry, forget all that.

Well, nearly everything a person does in mainstream western society has ongoing potential negative consequences etc… Our system is unsustainable as it stands; driving gasoline cars kills babies in the Middle East and Africa, whether we admit it or not, and most of us seem to find this unimportant, or at least less important than driving to the movies.

But I’m going to hope that you gave your friend a new perspective on vaccination, and also that your own illness stays in the past. I prefer to speculate on the possible good outcomes if there’s really no way of knowing!

Thank you very much!

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