Best Shot – Protecting ourselves from the anti-vaccine movement

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&#x27;s concerns.<p>I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there&#x27;s an irrational &quot;What about X&quot; 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&#x27;ve met - aren&#x27;t interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines are bad. We&#x27;re based in Poland, and there&#x27;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&#x27;m close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I can&#x27;t idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God knows what&#x27;ll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother&#x27;s back; I don&#x27;t hold out much hope.<p>Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I&#x27;m at my wit&#x27;s end.

I think it&#x27;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&#x27;m 30, and I&#x27;ve never had any of those. I&#x27;ve never even seen a case of measles in anyone I know. I&#x27;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&#x27;t believe it had been properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was &quot;anti-vaccine&quot; 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 &quot;See? I told you so!&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s still the question.

<i>Like vaccination, homeopathic remedies work on the principle of like cures like</i><p>What&#x27;s the emoticon for &lt;fistbite&gt;?

Aren&#x27;t the vaccines supposed to protect us from the anti-vaccine movement? Oh right, they don&#x27;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&#x27;t a problem and just quit putting it in there as a preservative. This OTOH is not hard. I&#x27;m not going to debate weather the mercury passes through, just pointing out that we don&#x27;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 &quot;for free&quot; I don&#x27;t think the cost difference is too much for a first world country. Eliminate the concern rather than worry about convincing people.