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Low Vaccination Rates At Silicon Valley Daycare Facilities
Vaccination rates across the U.S. don't neatly correlate with religiosity or wealth; Wired reports that one conspicuous pocket of low vaccination rates, according to California's state database of daycare records, is a place where you might not expect it: Silicon Valley — specifically, the daycare centers at some large tech companies.
A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases. At least, that’s according to a giant database from the California Department of Public Health, which tracks the vaccination rates at day care facilities and preschools in the state. We selected more than 20 large technology and health companies in the Bay Area and researched their day care offerings. Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data. ... And those six have a level of measles vaccination that does not provide the “herd immunity” critical to the spread of the disease. Now, this data has limitations—most critically, it might not be current. But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth.
They're dogmatic. They spend their entire university career learning formulas and recipes (excuse me, algorithms) without questioning them the way physicists or philosophers do. They spend the time, and they know their science, but they don't know why what they know is right, they just know that what they know IS right. This is also why there is a far greater number of creationists among engineers than there is among any other STEM discipline.
And because they only learn the results, not the history and argumentation that led up to the result, they're not as well prepared to deal with the barrage of idiocy that is spewed by people like anti-vaxxers. When you have a lesser idea of why what you know is the truth, you have a lesser resistance against people who argue that what you think is the truth is not the truth.
This may be a controversial opinion here on slashdot, and I fully expect to be downvoted, but it is the truth nevertheless, borne out again and again in every study on the subject.
This drives a silver stake through the heart of the idea that vaccines cause autism. You would expect that in a place where autism is a required skill on resumes everyone would be vaccinated.
Because there are a small number of children and adults who have medical problems that prevent them from getting the vaccines. These people are put at real risk when other individuals don't vaccinate.
That may well be true, but injecting something into my kids to protect other people's kids is not my job and not the job of my kids.
The odds of a reaction might be low, but they aren't zero. No amount of compensation will undo such a reaction.