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Study Finds Vaccine Science Outreach Only Reinforced Myths (arstechnica.com)
Ars Technica reports on a study suggesting that "Striking at a myth with facts may only shore it up." Applehu Akbar writes:
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied public attitudes toward vaccination in a group whose opinions on the subject were polled before and after being shown three different kinds of explanatory material that used settled scientific facts about vaccines to explain the pro-vaccination side of the debate. Not only was the anti-vax cohort not convinced by any of the three campaigns, but their attitudes hardened when another poll was taken a week later.
What seems to have happened was that the pro-vax campaign was taken by anti-vaxers as just another attempt to lie to them, and as reinforcement for their already made-up minds on the subject. A previous study at Dartmouth College in 2014 used similar methodology and except for the 'hardening' effect elicited similar results. What's really scary about this is that while the Dartmouth subjects were taken from a large general population, the Edinburgh subjects were college students.
"The researchers speculate that the mere repetition of a myth during the process of debunking may be enough to entrench the myth in a believer's mind," writes Ars Technica, with one of the study's authors attributing this to the "illusory truth" effect.
"People tend to mistake repetition for truth."
What seems to have happened was that the pro-vax campaign was taken by anti-vaxers as just another attempt to lie to them, and as reinforcement for their already made-up minds on the subject. A previous study at Dartmouth College in 2014 used similar methodology and except for the 'hardening' effect elicited similar results. What's really scary about this is that while the Dartmouth subjects were taken from a large general population, the Edinburgh subjects were college students.
"The researchers speculate that the mere repetition of a myth during the process of debunking may be enough to entrench the myth in a believer's mind," writes Ars Technica, with one of the study's authors attributing this to the "illusory truth" effect.
"People tend to mistake repetition for truth."
Nice lie you got there. The science has been settled about a century ago. Unfortunately, the vaccine against stupidity still eludes us.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's always important to ask, "What evidence would change your mind?"
If the answer is, "Nothing." Then there is a big problem with the ideology.
Yes, it's annoying when your kids question you all the time, and I feel for teachers who have to deal with everyone else's kids... but maybe we ought to stop with the Santa and Tooth Fairy and all the other 'cute and harmless' lies we tell kids.
Instead, we ought to be asking them what they think, and why, and then show them where they've made errors... so when they come up against something new, they have a fighting chance of figuring it out without someone holding their hand the whole time.
The best experience I ever had in school was a teacher mocking me for being afraid to be wrong, which is really the fork in the road where you either try to figure something out or just shut down and stick with your initial belief. We need more of that for our kids.
Yes. And they work as advertised, which is: not perfectly on every individual, so the whole society needs the herd immunity. Which anti-vaccers are endangering, in fact they outright destroyed it in some areas of Europe (for measles, at least). So, we have to thank the anti-vaccers in Europe for killing children and endangering everyone to prove a point that did not need any more proof in the first place.
Heck, you don't even need to be a scientist, you only need to go into areas where people who did not get vaccinated from endemic diseases are getting ill all the time, and you and your family, who did get vaccinated (and got bitten by the !@#$!@#$ mosquitoes just the same), don't get ill.
Jeez, even the optional H1N1 vaccines, which are in the very end of "low effectiveness" -- you often end up getting slightly ill, instead of seriously/dangerously ill -- can be easily seen working when you have a major outbreak, like we had in Brazil two years ago. More than 8000 people *DEAD* among the non-vaccinated, less than 100 among the vaccinated, plus a very sharp decline on hospitalizations (and deaths) two weeks after the massive vaccination campaigns *AND* no outbreak on the next year (the government started vaccinating people two months in advance, there was some spillover from the previous year, and much much more people got vaccinated).
Second, "flu like symptoms" is far FAR from having the flu itself. People tend to forget just how horribly having a bad flu can affect them. You can still go to work, take care of the kids and so on with "flu like symptoms", but it is quite common for the actual flu to leave you bedridden for days. Even with routine flu infections, there is a risk of death. And the nature of the flu virus is such that we can never wholly predict when the next pandemic killer flu will appear. Remember that H1N1 has been fingered as the killer behind the "Spanish Flu", a disease that, in two years killed more people world wide than the entirety of WW1. Something close to 20% of people who contracted the disease DIED. With the vaccines we have now, mortality rate is something like 0.01% We've gone to entire families dying, to a percentage smaller than a rounding error. I'd say that very VERY effectively demonstrates the effectiveness of flu vaccines don't you?
And while I'm at it, let me say that "flu like symptoms" are not contagious, but the flu certainly is. You can contract and pass along the flu for a day or so before you even have a hint that you're sick, and you can remain contagious for up to 10 days after first noticing symptoms. Being vaccinated reduces that window of contagion a great deal, making everyone else safer as well. (that is the bigger part of the herd immunity effect. The other part is that, with far fewer hosts to replicate in, the opportunities for the virus to mutate into something more virulent are drastically reduced.)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
OK, Zero__Kelvin, I surrender. I am not going to argue the validity of my comparisons any longer.
YOU, on the other hand, need to learn to focus on the reality of DELIBERATELY un-vaccinated children lowering the herd immunity and causing pain, suffering, and sometimes even death to those that did not have the opportunity to get their vaccinations - whether through recent immigration, economic issues, or simple ignorance.
I hope you never have to live through the grief I am still living with because of a simple MEASLES vaccination (MMR) that was late - and my daughter is deaf - FOR LIFE - because she caught the disease from a 'religious objector' (through no fault of his).
I will live with this issue for the rest of my life - because I was not timely in getting Deborah's MMR booster on time.
Get off your BS nit-picking and actually try to do something that HELPS the world - not just a piss-ant word-war on who is the most explicitly accurate in their analogies!
I've tried - really hard, considering, to be decent about this debate, but you are basically just a royal asshole.
I may get banned - but YOU will have to learn to live with your conscious - - - and just MIGHT eventually learn to be civil and courteous when posting.
redneck geek
As someone who grew up in the 1970s, I can assure you the climatology talk which filtered out to the general public back then was about whether or not we'd enter another ice age.
The explanation given in your link (that the mass media was hyping global cooling, but climate scientists were publishing papers about global warming) doesn't really help. It just confirms the belief that the mass media will hype whatever they want rather than report accurately.
Just as 1 in every 10,000 Toyotas, Mercedes Benzes or Teslas is going to be a lemon, 1 in 10,000 vaccinations can "go wrong". This is just the nature of such things.
That said, it really sucks if YOU buy that specific Toyota, Mercedes Benz or Tesla. And more so if YOUR kid is that ONE in 10,000. You can dump the car lemon, you have the child until they die. I personally know of one such extremely tragic case, so the pro-vaxxers should just shut up and admit to the reality of the stats.
Yes, the reality is every once in a while a child has a really bad reaction from a vaccine but the reality of the flip side is A LOT worse. I don't know how accurate your 1 in 10000 number is but that sounds like REALLY good odds to me. Before vaccines, 1 in 3 kids didn't make it to adulthood. Which odds would you rather have for your kid? A 1 in 10000 chance of dying from a vaccine or a 1 in 3 chance of dying from not getting a vaccine? Sure, because most people are vaccinated today, your odds are a little better than 1 in 3 even if you don't get a vaccine but it's still not as good as with getting the vaccine. When the odds of complications exceed the odds of catching the disease, that's when we discontinue the vaccine. That's why no one gets vaccinated for smallpox anymore except for a few soldiers going to a few high risk areas.
As a data person, the one thing I wish that the pro-vaccine people would start doing is listing the odds of complications of the vaccine right next to the estimated odds of catching the disease. I think some antivaxers might respond to that if you said "odds of bad reaction 1/10000, current odds of catching disease 1/1000, historical odds of catching the disease 1/100, odds of dying if you catch the disease 1/3"