I am struggling with the anti-vaccine movement right now.<p>My daughter - 18 months - has had her basic vaccinations, but is late for her MMR due to my wife's concerns.<p>I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there's an irrational "What about X" counterargument.<p>The fact that every rational explanation is greeted with another absurdity reveals the sad truth: she -and the other anti-vaccine people I've met - aren't interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines are bad. We're based in Poland, and there's a huge amount of plausible-looking anti-vaccine information out there.<p>Most unhelpfully, a child in our social circle recently had to be hospitalised after a one-in-a-million allergic reaction to their MMR.<p>I'm close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I can't idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God knows what'll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother's back; I don't hold out much hope.<p>Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I'm at my wit's end.
I think it's because the threat is not visible.<p>In the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc were very common. Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were, and vaccines were a clear way of solving this imminent and pressing issue.<p>I'm 30, and I've never had any of those. I've never even seen a case of measles in anyone I know. I'm obviously still going to vaccinate my children, but the benefit is not immediately obvious. They are very unlikely to get measles no matter what I do.
I got a lot of flak when pig SARS came around.<p>A few weeks after the news of an outbreak came around, a vaccine was available in Finland.<p>I refused the vaccine under the premise that I didn't believe it had been properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was "anti-vaccine" and some kind of right wing wacko and that Bush was the devil, etc.<p>A couple years later, it turned out the vaccine gave a bunch of Finnish kids narcolepsy, but by this point nobody was focused on pig SARS and my "See? I told you so!" fell on deaf ears.<p>I think vaccine-hesitance is too readily labeled as anti-vaccine, and there is a confirmation bias where it is easy to point out that someone is sick with an XYZ infection but it is difficult to show correlation between a vaccination that occurred 5 years ago and some symptoms that end up appearing as a result of that vaccination.
I know this is going to get massive downvotes, but it really comes down to this decision:<p>Are you willing to potentially (under non-trivial odds) sacrifice your child's health in some serious, potentially life-altering way, in order that the whole community will be helped in some amorphous fashion?<p>Whether pro- or anti-vaccination, that's really the question.<p>You can put emphasis more heavily on the first or the second part as your biases and experiences warrant, but that's still the question.
Aren't the vaccines supposed to protect us from the anti-vaccine movement? Oh right, they don't always work so we need herd immunity. How about this:<p>Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.<p>Stop telling people the mercury really isn't a problem and just quit putting it in there as a preservative. This OTOH is not hard. I'm not going to debate weather the mercury passes through, just pointing out that we don't even need to have the discussion. I know cost is supposed to be a factor, but when my employer is having someone come to give flu shots "for free" I don't think the cost difference is too much for a first world country. Eliminate the concern rather than worry about convincing people.