I used to spend time in an online antivax community because it was a good source of alternative health info. Some members had Phds and we're published authors.
Most people there had very negative personal experiences with vaccines. Either themselves or one of their children had a serious reaction.
It's known that some people have serious reactions. This isn't something made up by anti-vaxxers. But the current climate gets people with real problems treated as nutters who simply don't have a real medical issue.
When I was growing up, we counted success in terms of how many people got vaccinations, but there was no expectation it would ever be 100 percent. Now, we act like we "failed" to get 100 percent when we quote stats rather than counting the high percentage of vaccinated as a big success.
I think the root cause of the antivax movement is probably that we are leaving no room for those edge cases who have a genuine problem with vaccines, medically speaking. Those edge cases -- those people for whom this is a real problem -- seem to have concluded that the only way to protect their own right to choose is to make antivax the default norm instead of pro vax.
It's probably doomed because vaccines have proven to be beneficial to society as a whole. But if it is clear in your own mind that vaccines are a threat to your life, it readily becomes a hill you are willing to die on, so to speak.
I'm neither antivax nor pro vax. I think vaccines have their uses, but we need room for those edge cases to have the right to choose.
I get vilified by both camps because neither can tolerate a moderate position, which suggests to me they are both basically equally crazy. A reasonable person is aware that exceptions exist and that you have to have a system that makes allowances for that reality.
Actually my mom almost died from vaccination, her arm got swollen up and she must have been close to some kind of allergic shock. (Must have been in the 60s - one can only speculate for the reasons, obviously hygiene wasn't that far back then/perhaps it was a 'living' vaccine.) So luckily I did get all basic vaccinations as a young child but when my parents divorced, visits to the doctors happened only in case of emergency if you will. There was a deep distrust towards doctors because of this traumatic experience.
And yes, I agree, the discussions have become useless. In fact I would go so far to say that in middle-class society people avoid discussions and at best just agree which is actually meaning a slow death for democracy. Those who still continue to do discussions end up doing these in closed circles apart from public discourse, that's tragic and easy loot for alt-rights/anti-vaxxers who can then claim that discourse isn't working because we didn't practise it properly. From a philosophical standpoint I think foundations of all knowledge must be observed and talked about.
Those that have serious real issues with vaccines are the ones that rely on herd immunity so it is quite counter-productive for them to work towards making anti-vax the norm.
This assertion contradicts the comment by you that I replied to, which asserts reasonable doubt can exist in people who aren't fundamentally nutters concerning the value of vaccines. I agree with your previous comment.
> This assertion contradicts the comment by you that I replied to, which asserts reasonable doubt can exist in people who aren't fundamentally nutters concerning the value of vaccines.
No, that comment asserts that it only takes one small unreasonable conclusion to send you down the path toward an anti-vax conclusion. That's not what reasonable doubt is.
> ... but there was no expectation it would ever be 100 percent
Not sure where this straw man argument came from but I'll bite.
The point isn't to get a certain number of people vaccinated and never was. The point is to eliminate preventable diseases that can be deadly or cause permanent harm (eg paralysis, infertility). To do that you need herd immunity, which is typically quoted at 95%+ immunity.
The US achieved this and "eliminated" measles in 2000 but thanks to promulgating baseless falsehoods and people losing the memory of the effects of diseases, immunization rates began to fall and diseases that were effectively eliminated returned.
While you seem to want to paint anti-vaxxers as those simply having a bad reaction, I beg to differ. Even if true, the tactics border on the truly abhorrent [1].
Some people genuinely can't get vaccines. This is also why vaccination never will be at 100% and why it's important that anyone who medically can get a vaccine should as that herd immunity protects the vulnerable.
While you seem to want to paint anti-vaxxers as those simply having a bad reaction
No, and I'm not sure how to more clearly state that isn't my point.
Certainly at this point, it's a movement and there are latecomers who believe in it without having been personally burned. But I spent some years on a forum where active members were people trying to resolve serious health issues and being dismissed by mainstream medicine as nutters in a way they found very personally threatening because of their history.
Some of those people were very well educated and articulate. If you radicalize a small group of persuasive people, it shouldn't be shocking when the result is some kind of movement born of their efforts at self defense for survival reasons.
I'm sorry but taking a 'both sides' stance here is remarkably disingenuous and ignores the current reason why anti-vaxxers exist.
We, as a society, already make exceptions for people who cannot have vaccines. I would know, as I went through an incredibly bad allergic reaction to vaccines as a child. You can ask anyone advocating for vaccinations and they will tell you that yes, vaccines can have side effects and people can have adverse reactions.
The root cause of the anti-vaxx movement isn't those people. It's people who take a purely ideological stance against vaccines, ignoring the scientific fact that vaccines in general are safe in favor of believing that vaccines cause autism or any number of bullshit things created by quacks. People are abusing exceptions to vaccinations and in turn are directly threatening people like myself who may not have an actual choice in the matter. So I'd appreciate it if you didn't use people like me as a smokescreen for those that threaten my well-being.
When you choose to not vaccinate, you're no longer talking about just your life. You're talking about the lives of those around you.
You cannot frame the argument solely in terms of 'your own life' unless we're talking about vaccinations for diseases that don't spread across the population. The flu may be milder than most diseases, but the flu can and does kill people. Including those that are young and healthy.
People give you absolute hell for it because it's a selfish line of thought if you don't actually have a good excuse for not vaccinating. And the anti-vaxx movement more often than not does not have a good excuse.
So it's okay for you to not vaccinate because you have a good excuse. It's not okay for me to skip a historically non mandatory vaccine, nor to advocate for my own right to protect my own life and health.
This is exactly the line of reasoning I'm criticizing. This is the type of ugly argument that radicalizes people with serious health issues who find it beneficial to not vaccinate, but don't have "the right excuse" to make that okay for them.
You were all up in arms at the idea that I was talking about you. You are still being attacking when it's my life on the line here.
Okay then, let's establish a baseline: What, exactly then, is your reason for skipping vaccination? What is your exact reason? I've given mine for why I have had to avoid some vaccines in the past.
Because as I've established above, people who cannot get vaccines for legitimate health reasons (such as allergic reactions or compromised immune systems) are already protected by the system that exists. Otherwise if you're denying vaccines for ideological reasons: You are threatening the lives of other people for no good reason.
I've already stated my reason above: people who were helping to save my life recommended against them and skipping them has proven beneficial.
I'm supposed to be dead. Much of the world has a very big problem with my rude failure to die on schedule from a condition so bad it's classified as a dread disease.
Your further insistence that I owe you some kind of explanation for my personal medical choice flies in the face of HIPAA, something
I had annual training in when I had a job with a Fortune 500 company.
> You can ask anyone advocating for vaccinations and they will tell you that yes, vaccines can have side effects and people can have adverse reactions.
This isn’t my experience. Most people I know refer to people who do not vaccinate their kids as “antivax wackos” because they (my friends) believe that vaccines are almost 100% effective and 100% harmless. If they thought there were side effects or adverse reactions they couldn’t paint all people who don’t vaccinate with the “wacko” brush.
I’m glad to hear that you have encountered people who are more enlightened, but I wanted to point out that this is not everyone’s experience.
Note: I have vaccinated my kids and I regularly get the flu shot. I live in Silicon Valley, for context of where I’m encountering the folks I described.
EDIT: can you explain why you’re downvoting this? Do you doubt that this is my experience, find it irrelevant, or something else?
I'm just going to note here that all replies to me have been pretty ugly, even -- to my surprise -- the reply from the person I replied to who was actively taking an apologist position on behalf of anti-vaxxers, yet still has some big issue with me tossing out my two cents as to the likely origins of the movement.
My point is only that being between two arbitrarily chosen extremes does not make a position any more or less likely to be correct. It's not a sound form of reasoning and not a good foundation from which to argue correctness.
To pick an extreme example: the morally correct position between "genocide" and "no genocide" is not "some genocide".
You implicitly assume that I chose some random midpoint based on mathematically dividing the two.
You are still guilty of assuming that it isn't possible to have some more nuanced position than "either for them or against them!" rooted in actually reading and thinking through things.
Implying I'm utterly crazy with your first example doesn't exactly help here.
> You implicitly assume that I chose some random midpoint based on mathematically dividing the two.
Please accept my apologies for being less than maximally clear.
I am not assuming your position is a randomly selected midpoint. I am not assuming your position is based on mathematically dividing between two extremes. I am asserting that you have a position between two extremes.
Which, assuming that I interpret what you have written correctly, is what you have claimed to be true.
> You are still guilty of assuming that it isn't possible to have some more nuanced position than "either for them or against them!" rooted in actually reading and thinking through things.
Again, please accept my deep and heartfelt apologies for being unclear. It's definitely, absolutely, completely possible to have a nuanced, thought-out, and supportable position between any two extremes. To draw on a previous example, not everyone agrees that broccoli is delicious, and this is both a reasonable and defensible position to hold.
It may be worth considering that the reasonableness of a position could be independent of its distance from extremes. Or even independent of who does or does not agree with you.
My point is merely this: being a moderate between any two extremes is not magical. It does not a position correct. It does not make a position incorrect. It is completely irrelevant to the question of correctness.
Again, please accept my apologies if I was in any way unclear. I intended no insult whatsoever, in any way, shape, form, or manner. I do hope I have helped clarify matters somewhat, but please let me know if I have not risen to the task I have set myself.
My point is merely this: being a moderate between any two extremes is not magical. It does not a position correct.
I never asserted that it did. Only that both camps are equally unwilling to consider the possibility that a reasonable position exists other than their own. Pro vaxxers and anti vaxxers are equally guilty of framing this as "you must be in one camp or the other, period." Such framing inevitably sucks the oxygen out of the discussion and makes it impossible to have civil intellectual discourse.
To extend, being attacked by multiple camps of people who all disagree with a moderated position is silent on the correctness - or sanity - of all involved.
No. The pattern of behavior in both this discussion and the world generally is not rational.
My original comment was simply about my opinion about where this movement began. You and other people have largely ignored that to engage in various forms of dismissiveness of me personally.
If pro vaxxers were as rational as they like to claim, commenting on the origin of the antivax movement shouldn't result in this kind of pattern of behavior.
Most people there had very negative personal experiences with vaccines. Either themselves or one of their children had a serious reaction.
It's known that some people have serious reactions. This isn't something made up by anti-vaxxers. But the current climate gets people with real problems treated as nutters who simply don't have a real medical issue.
When I was growing up, we counted success in terms of how many people got vaccinations, but there was no expectation it would ever be 100 percent. Now, we act like we "failed" to get 100 percent when we quote stats rather than counting the high percentage of vaccinated as a big success.
I think the root cause of the antivax movement is probably that we are leaving no room for those edge cases who have a genuine problem with vaccines, medically speaking. Those edge cases -- those people for whom this is a real problem -- seem to have concluded that the only way to protect their own right to choose is to make antivax the default norm instead of pro vax.
It's probably doomed because vaccines have proven to be beneficial to society as a whole. But if it is clear in your own mind that vaccines are a threat to your life, it readily becomes a hill you are willing to die on, so to speak.
I'm neither antivax nor pro vax. I think vaccines have their uses, but we need room for those edge cases to have the right to choose.
I get vilified by both camps because neither can tolerate a moderate position, which suggests to me they are both basically equally crazy. A reasonable person is aware that exceptions exist and that you have to have a system that makes allowances for that reality.