[Let me just start with my usual rant that the whole division of generations by arbitrary birth dates is ridiculous, but in this case it’s a rough fit for the timeline.]
Not exactly. As an early boomer I got the polio vaccine in the 50s, but I got measles, mumps, and chicken pox, (and maybe rubella, I don’t remember) the good old-fashioned way, and I remember it well. Vaccines for those diseases came along from 1963-1974, so younger boomers and Gen X were the first to benefit, and their boomer and older parents took full advantage. My own kids are millennials, and you can bet they got all their shots.
Millennials born around 1981-1995 are now in their childbearing years, and they seem to be the ones rejecting vaccines, for whatever reasons.
Oppositional Defiance Disorder is a human response to too much data to sort through. they now run away from large data sets but have left themselves open to being played by evil interests that disguise themselves as rebels against big data sets.
Thanks for the clarification on dates/generations. And thanks for vaccinating your kids. I am off generation myself (parents 1944, me 1971, kids 2000) so it is sometimes easier just to spew my experience than actual agreed upon timeframes. My kids are vaccinated.
There might be a clue there: politics changed drastically with the election of Reagan in 1980 (at the time, the Republican party itself thought he was a wacko with rabid fans, but they recognized that he was their most electable option to get a Republican in the White House…4 years later, they thought he was the best thing since sliced bread). Anyway, Millennials were born into a culture that no longer could trust the Establishment/government at all (even more so than the upheaval in the late 60s-early 70s, because their cynicism was built on those earlier struggles with authority). So why would they trust any other authority, even medical? Especially when the AMA was involved in a lot of its own power struggles which reflected on the overall medical community in general.
Yeah, this shit cost us a lot of credibility. Most docs I know who are not rabid right wing loons are not AMA members and would rather it just shut up and go away, but that damage has been done. It certainly contributes to the general mistrust of medicine, which is unfortunate.
According to tax filings, Wakefield brought in more than $3 million US to advance his debunked cause through non-profits and research over the past decade. A number of those non-profits have since been dissolved.
