Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Kids Tend To Be Affluent, Better Educated (go.com)

schwit1 quotes ABC News: Vaccines are universally backed by respected scientists and federal agencies, but that isn't enough to convince every parent to vaccinate their children. The decision to fly in the face of near universal scientific opinion doesn't come as a result of a lack of intellect, however, as experts who have studied vaccines and immunology acknowledge that many parents who don't vaccinate their children are well-educated. They also appear to be the victims of a widespread misinformation campaign, the experts said.

Daniel Salmon, who is the director of the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, said that existing research suggests that there are some common attributes that many parents who choose not to vaccinate their children share. "They tend to be better educated. They tend to be white, and they tend to be higher income. They tend to have larger families and they tend to use complementary and alternative medicine like chiropractors and naturopaths," Salmon said.
Salman also says outbreaks typically start when an American returns from a visit to Europe, where there are much higher rates of measles than in the U.S. But lower vaccination rates help it spread.

One study in August reported Russian trolls "seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society," though their campaign on Twitter failed to gain traction.

"I blame Amazon Prime," writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland. "That 'misinformation' they're talking about is the pseudoscience documentary Vaxxed -- and Amazon is one of the top site's pushing it. The movie is not only free for all Prime members -- Amazon's actually featuring it on the front page showing free-with-Prime movies."

Comments

One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a pattern that I recognized. There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.

E.g. Randall Munroe of xkcd or Ricky Gervais are famous examples.

They simply LOOK and ACT smart, but they aren't really that smart. They're just not utter and complete morons.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[bobstreo]

There's plenty of issues people have with vaccines that are based in science, often from the vaccine companies themselves. It's a parent's choice to teach a child their culture, just the same to vaccinate or not... you cant shove a lifestyle onto anyone. One way or another...

Unless you're planning on home schooling them. No proof of vaccination, no public schools or most colleges for you.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[bill_mcgonigle]

You might be referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like somebody who is top of their game in field A assumes their knowledge is sufficient in field B.

They may also be bad at stats and be completely unaware of it.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Rei]

Antivaxxer kids are like dark humour - they never get old.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average,

The title says "better educated" . . . not "smarter".

Lots of folks are educated way beyond their intelligence.

If your family is affluent enough to send you to Andover, Exeter or St Paul's . . . you're better educated.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Found one of the educated ones.

Vaccination is not a lifestyle choice, regardless of what the morons spouting anti-vaccination rumors say.

Vaccination is a medical choice. You either assist society by exterminating destructive diseases, or you literally empower your dumb-by-extension children to accidentally infect and kill children with responsible parents, who are too young to be vaccinated.

Does that mean you need to get every vaccine for your child? No. Chicken pox has a vaccine these days and it's not on the same tier as other diseases (though why risk it?). Measles though? That stuff will kill your child and, if not them, then your neighbor's younger child who cannot get it yet. Thanks to people making the decisions that you're describing, combined with immigrants coming from places without the vaccine, Washington State has had to declare a state of emergency.

I actually agree that you should be free to avoid any and all vaccinations because that's what freedom allows. But that doesn't mean that you should be afforded the tax payer-assisted opportunity to then put your child into contact with everyone else's children in publicly funded places, like public school. And it definitely doesn't mean that when your child does get those diseases that the government should assist you financially to get through it.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[bobstreo]

So then they're off the hook for school taxes, right?

LOL no. School taxes are based on owning property regardless of how many children you have in the household.

The real value would be having 10 kids, same price as one.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Aighearach]

This is a pattern that I recognized. There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.

The above-average can't appear smart without being excessively credulous. It goes with not actually being all that smart. How else would they appear to be so? How else would they have more success than the next above-average person who doesn't have that extra appearance of intelligence? By being credulous, and identifying slightly better than average answers.

Or in Munroe's case, simply illustrating common ideas so that average people can understand them. He gets the credit for their understanding, so in their minds he's the equivalent of a college professor. But more fun, so he must be like a really good professor. Right?

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the pros and cons and there is no medical contraindication, but you still decide that your kids should not be vaccinated, then you can't blame it on science, you're just being a dumbass. This is not a lifestyle choice, the same way giving your children cigarettes is not a lifestyle choice. That's endangering a person in your care, and in the case of antivaxxers, many others too. If you and your kids are serious threat to the well-being of a population, that population is morally justified to defend against you. People are afflicted with lifelong handicaps due to that sheer idiocy. Some even die. This is not tolerable. People who do not have their kids vaccinated should be banned from medical insurance.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[LifesABeach]

I look at non vaccinating folks as very proud that they're willing to watch their children be damaged or killed. Bless their hearts.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Aighearach]

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

Not, "trade unto Caesar where you expect to benefit from Caesar's public works."

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Aighearach]

OK, let me explain the language that was used above that confused you.

The thing you saw talked about education. Because that is a data point you will have about a sub-population. But people aren't asked for an IQ score on forms, people don't have any sort of formal listing of their intelligence for you to track. So the data collection part will use education as a proxy for things like that.

Then, you came upon the slashdot comments, where somebody was offering an explanation that includes considerations of intelligence. This doesn't mean they misunderstood the story; it means they are commenting on it.

Hopefully that was educational.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[hey!]

I have a younger relative who's an anti-vaxxer, and she has a master's degree in school counseling. She's not a bad person, in fact she's a good person but with overblown, romantic disposition that blinds her to her own folly on the issue.

Here's what I think happened. After Vietnam, and revelations about cigarette companies lying about lung cancer, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, we've done a good job teaching people to be wary of authority and corporate power. We haven't, however, done such a great job in giving them something *other* than trust in authority to fall back on. We haven't taught them to be skeptical.

Disbelieving a traditional authority figure and then putting your faith in an alternative authority is not skepticism. Treating every question of fact as if it were a matter of opinion isn't skepticism either. Both these things kinds of weak-tea skepticism are just alternative forms of credulity.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they should be banned from medical insurance because they're taking the benefits of the group for themselves, but refuse to be part of the group when it comes to fighting epidemics. If they were only endangering themselves, it would not be an adequate reaction, but they're not and it would be.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Ol Olsoc]

This is a pattern that I recognized. There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.

E.g. Randall Munroe of xkcd or Ricky Gervais are famous examples.

They simply LOOK and ACT smart, but they aren't really that smart. They're just not utter and complete morons.

This should be at +5 pronto.

Reading the article, these people are also tending to alternative medicine, some of which works, but the majority not. Might as well try tapping or crystal resonances.

But to AC's insightful and informative post. An education does not equal intelligence or smarts. Many college courses are based on giving your opinion, not on actually learning anything. That's how in the US, a Philosophy graduate is considered vastly superior to a master machinist, although there are a lot of dumb philosophy majors, and the next stupid master machinist I meet will be my first.

The US at least has turned edumacation and grades into a birthright, while people really haven't become smarter.

Anyhow, the anti-vaxxers appear to be women of their conviction. They should accept criminal responsibility if their children die of some easily preventable disease.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[MillerHighLife21]

IMO what enables anti-vaccination stances is the almost feral response to even voicing concern. My children are both fully vaccinated but we were concerned about pediatric appointments where they were given more than two vaccines at the same time...so we worked with our pediatrician and spread the shots out. Instead of getting 4 in a single visit, we'd get 2 in a visit and then the next month get the other 2.

At no point did that seem unreasonable to either of us but the anti-anti-vax crowd attacked us as if we'd chosen not to vaccinate at all. It's as if taking a slight precaution somehow validated other people skipping vaccinations entirely.

That is where the conversation breaks down because specifically for autism...we have not positively identified the cause. As long as that remains true, there is an information vacuum that the general public will fill with speculation.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Zigakly]

The best part of an unvaccinated child is only 9 years of child support instead of 18

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Ricky Gervais advocate that appears smart but is actually stupid? The only thing I'm familiar with of his outside of comedy is atheism, but that is the rational approach.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[phantomfive]

It's not a matter of smart or stupid here. Even a very smart person will come to the wrong conclusion if they have bad data.

When people are ignorant of statistics, they are unable to collect good information, and unable to figure out what is true among multiple interpretations. The correlation is real, what do they decide?

There is a very real correlation between venemous spiders and spelling bee champions. That is undeniable. Understanding the correlation takes a level of understanding of statistics. What kind of experiment would you develop to determine if spider bites are causing spelling bee champions?

For people who don't understand statistics, the world is a very confusing place, no matter how smart you are.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[phantomfive]

they've tricked a bunch of people into thinking that the flu shot is a vaccine, and that having everybody take it would create "herd immunity." Even though it clearly doesn't; the success rate is far too low to create that effect.

That's good to know, no more flu shot for me.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! It's the same as fun control. If you don't want to get shot, just avoid wherever I happen to be shooting. The government shouldn't spend money restricting where I spray my death dealing projectiles, which happen to be lead, nor should they spend my tax dollars policing or cleaning up after it. People who don't want to get shot can simply up armor their daily lives with pope mobiles and Kevlar clothing.

Or maybe vaccination does make sense. Execute the communicators of the disease, by way of extensive slow, painful medical experimentation on them to nullify future risks.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[xenog]

I would expect skydiving accidents to rarely require much in the way of healthcare.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[The Grim Reefer]

Chicken pox has a vaccine these days and it's not on the same tier as other diseases (though why risk it?).

I wish my wife and I would have given the chicken pox vaccine more thought before agreeing to it. We knew there were some questions about it at time, but we weren't told it was one of the vaccines to be administered that day. Naturally we were told it was great and all of the issues were blown out of proportion.

Of course now most in the field are saying that it's probably going to need a booster, or even two as its effectiveness is going to diminish after 20 to 30 years. So it's possible that those who had it could now get chicken pox as adults, which is much more dangerous. But as far as I've been able to find, there's still no booster. And in all honesty, I don't think most people in their 20's or early 30's are going to think about this. I know I wouldn't have at that age.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[queequeg1]

Good point. I live in a somewhat rural part of Clark County, WA (where the recent measles outbreak is taking place) and know a fair number of parents who are adamantly against vaccines. They tend to fall into one of two camps. First, there is a more religious group (Apostolic Lutherans being a significant portion but a number from a variety of Christian sects) that homeschools their kids (although even homeschooled kids will have a number of interactions with regularly schooled children). Relatively few of them will go to college. Instead, they generally move into a skilled trade after getting their GEDs. These people have generally been living in the area for generations and I seriously doubt that any level of education will change their minds. Closing them off from public schools/colleges will have little effect. I read their posts on the community Facebook pages and the shortsightedness and irresponsibility makes my mind reel. While they don't like measles, the prospect of infection isn't nearly enough to make them change their minds. I question whether anything more serious would. Second, there is a large community of first generation Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, many of whom tend to look with suspicion at anything any government asks them to do. I suspect this community will come around after a generation, if not sooner, since this group, although wary of government, tends to be more pragmatic and some of the measles infections have occurred in Slavic community centers and private schools.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[93 Escort Wagon]

I would be curious if these “better educated” parents disproportionately fall into one particular professional field. My guess is that engineering is very strongly represented in the anti-vaxxer group.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've come to similar conclusions, and I couldn't have said it better myself.

I think it's a bit deeper than that, and I trace it back a bit further to the counter culture of the 60s and rejection of "square culture". But we're still largely in agreement to the origin of the contagion, and a potential cure.

I'm skeptical that you can really teach proper skepticism in large numbers though. Separating out fact from fiction takes the right kind of intelligence, and the right kind of humility and self-doubt. Those qualities are relatively rare in the world, so that's why we get nonsense-fest. Nonsense-fest isn't really anything new... what's new is the enlighment and reliance on empirical evidence and science. In some ways that era is threatened, plunging the world into a new dark age.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[thegarbz]

We haven't, however, done such a great job in giving them something *other* than trust in authority to fall back on.

I would think the very process that identified those cigarettes as being bad for you would be a good fallback mechanism. Those damn big cigar corporations lying to us, scientists exposed them! Wait vaccinations? I don't trust science!

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry that you felt attacked. An extra month of risk is minor in the grand scheme of things.

However, vaccine timing is a very well studied field since there is lots of data. So immunologists have plenty of data to know when and how serious adverse reactions can occur. In fact, there is an entire reporting system for vaccine reactions: VAERS

With that data, doctors can know when it's unsafe to give vaccines. Such as this chart from the CDC with contraindications and precautions of when not to vaccinate. Even further here's a peer reviewed paper on the topic

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Quakeulf]

But why should you care if they don't vaccinate as long as you vaccinate? Isn't that what vaccines are for?

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

because there are some people that can't be vaccinated for various reasons and people who could be but choose not to put them at risk, kids who have certain disorders, newborns, women who are pregnant who may not be as well protected by their own childhood vaccinations because of changes in body chemistry, elderly people, etc, etc, etc

to address what some anti-vaxxers try to rely on, yes there is a herd immunity, but we rely on it for those that legitimately can't be vaccinated and not just those that choose not to because they are morons, besides the fact that if we get enough morons, then the herd immunity disappears anyway

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[hey!]

The anti-vaxx conspiracy theory is that Big Pharma have co-opted scientists.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then, I think you are totally wrong. Most engineering professionals have understanding in logic and scientific methods, thus most likely to be pro-vaxxers. The training are based on hard, verifiable facts.

On the other hand, people with degrees from various forms of "soft" science where "facts" are much more fluid.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment shows that you don't understand how vaccination works. It's all about herd immunity.

In short, it's the population, not the individuals, which matters.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[virtualXTC]

The booster is called "singles vaccine" If those that get chicken pox as a kid are still susceptible to singles later in life despite it being caused by the same virus, why would you expect a vaccine to be any more efficacious than contracting the disease it self?

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[meglon]

The chicken pox vaccine is given between 12-15 months, and the booster is given at 4-6 years.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[meglon]

No. The booster is given at 4-6 years old, and is called a chicken poxbooster.

Shingles, on the other hand, is an older persons thing. People who had chicken pox as kids are susceptible to having the virus reactivate when they get older giving them shingles. The shingles vaccination (typically suggested for anyone over 60 who actually had chickenpox, not the chickenpox vaccine) reduces that risk, and if they do end up having shingles, it reduces the severity.

So to sum up your question: not getting the vaccine, and getting chickenpox puts you line to get shingles later in life; getting the vaccine (as a child) means you're not in line to get shingles later in life; having chickenpox and then getting the shingles vaccine as an older person means you have a lower chance to get shingles, and it will be less severe if you do.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Highdude702]

That big spatula isnt free you know!

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Hognoxious]

That's typical of how for-profit healthcare works. Over here, with our cawmnust NHS, we make do with a mop.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[sjames]

The problem is "authorities" also told us to give up butter in favor of trans-fat laden margarine and keeps alternately telling us eggs are good and eggs are of the devil. Then the people who brought out that smoking is harmful and then somewhat exaggerated the claims for 2nd hand smoke have started going off about 3rd and even 4th hand smoke (I'm not kidding).

All of that really has left a vacuum that is now being filled by cranks and quacks.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Hognoxious]

Singles vaccine? Is that the one that makes it less likely your children will get diseases?

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Scarletdown]

It will be amusing to see the Antivaxxers infiltrate the U.S. military. There, if you are scheduled for vaccinations, you will get them, or you no longer qualify to deploy; which would likely mean also not qualifying to remain in the service.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Dorianny]

It is not so much the mistrust in authority figures in the FDA, CDC, or medical community. It is a belief that the Corporations producing the vaccines are lying and misleading not only laypeople but doctors and authorities as well. The role pharmaceutical companies played in the opioid epidemic is a glaring example of corporate profit-seeking and the failings of the system that is supposed to protect the public. Trust is in the system is badly eroded and stronger regulations and a stringent verification are needed to restore that trust

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Hognoxious]

Looks like cayenne8 forgot his password.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Ol Olsoc]

Reading the article, these people are also tending to alternative medicine, some of which works...

Alternative medicine that works is called... wait for it... ready... Medicine!

True, although not always used in mainstream meds. Arnica MOntana is great for muscle sprains and strains, but it has that homeopathy stigma (actually it isn't homeopathy because it's a tincture of the flowers of the arnica daisy, and does numbe the area very well. Smells good too, like new mown hay.

Then there is aconite patches. Some of my mother in law's students brought that over from China after I had broken my ankle and torn the ligaments in the same som years back. I'm allergic to opioids, and was in a lot of pain. The aconite patches tingled at first, then the pain went away for the rest of the day.

So some of this stuff that works hasn't entered mainstram medicine.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[wisnoskij]

This is s common lie many school administrators will tell you, but it is patently true. The article itself stated that the non-vaxed are among the most educated in the country. How do you think they got their?

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[smoot123]

There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.

Psychologists have studied this and I was just reading about it a week or so ago (but lost the reference--I hate getting old.) Basically, there's a negative correlation between how much you know and how much you think you know. In other words, the less you know about a topic, the more you tend to believe you know a lot about it and believe you can make accurate judgments.

That sounds like what's going on here. Affluent people tend to think they know a lot about a lot of topics. In the case of vaccines, they actually don't and don't even realize they don't.

Beware this pitfall yourself. It's useful to question how much you actually know about something and why you think that.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Highdude702]

That can get messy.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Falconnan]

I feel like the terms are wrong. "More educated" vs. "better educated" is a thing.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[steveb3210]

You'd be surprised. If you go and search on YouTube, there are some close-call accidents for where the jumper pulled low or had a the reserve tangle with their main and came down hard but survived....

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[dryeo]

You're right, the kids shouldn't get any medical help due to choosing parents who didn't vaccinate them.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[dryeo]

I call bullshit. There is plenty of evidence showing the benefits of vaccines. Usually direct benefits. The all too regular outbreaks among the unvaccinated are the counter-examples.

There's plenty of evidence of the dangers of vaccines as well, just that the dangers of vaccination are way less then not getting vaccinated.
Extreme example was smallpox inoculation, which reduced the odds of death something like from 75% to 25%. People were lining up to stick someones smallpox scab in their or their childs eye as it tripled the chances of survival. My numbers are probably off but not the idea.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[EvilSS]

But why should you care if they don't vaccinate as long as you vaccinate? Isn't that what vaccines are for?

Vaccines are not 100% effective across the population. For example, of the children who die from flu each year, around 20% were properly vaccinated. Additionally, there are populations who cannot, for valid medical reasons, be vaccinated. Thus, it's important that as many people who can be vaccinated are, to provide protection to those who cannot be vaccinated, or for whom a vaccine may not be effective.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Pinky's Brain]

So tell me, is my country doing Hep B vaccinations wrong? My country only gives the vaccine to newborns in risk populations (otherwise it happens after a month).

If my country is doing it correctly, why should parents in the US who know (with better information than any doctor has access to) they are low risk not follow my country's example?

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

A vaccine isn't a lifestyle

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[pigwin32]

Just a reminder https://science.slashdot.org/c.... There's not one in ten posters here that have done any research into vaccination, they've all just swallowed the coolaid.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[pigwin32]

Yeah sadly the "authorities" are also recipients of funding. You really nailed the premise but your conclusion is rubbish.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[edris90]

Why not? Marketing Department's do it parent do it all the time. So do schools, Neighbors, churches, Friends, etc whether they mean to or not. It's a pretty effective way of conditioning a people.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[TheRaven64]

Like most good conspiracy theories, most of the component parts are either true or at least entirely plausible:

• Companies that make vaccines want to make money (true).
• Phama companies overplay the benefits and downplay the side effects of their products (true in a number of examples).
• Vaccines have potentially lethal side effects (true for some vaccines, though in the vast majority of cases you're still better off getting the vaccine).
• Doctors are recommending vaccines because they're paid to do so (in the US, doctors often get kickbacks from drug companies for prescribing their products, so quite plausible).
• People in authority don't have your best interests at heart (no surprise there).

A big part of the problem is that we're still very bad at teaching science. We teach it as a set of results, not as a process. I'd be much happier if people left school not knowing the laws of motion or thermodynamics, but knowing how to interpret statistics and build experiments to test an hypothesis.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[TheRaven64]

Not quite. As Tim Minchin put it, alternative medicine is medicine that has either not been shown to work or been shown not to work. There are some things that work, but have not been studied sufficiently to show that they work. The process of moving things from the not-shown-to-work to shown-to-work category is called medical research.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Can'tNot]

I think it's politics. The Republicans are the party of big business and rich people. The Democrats are harder to explain, because the left is classically anti-government, but it can probably be reduced to partisanship: the government is the only thing which can stop companies from fully running roughshod over the population (with regulations ::spit::), so the Democrats support it, while the Republicans oppose the government for the same reason. Running roughshod is very profitable.

These positions might have been adopted for political reasons, but that sort of thing works its way into your psyche eventually. Distrust of private companies gets burned into your head. Partisanship between Republicans and Democrats has been growing ever since the Southern Strategy, which is coincident with the Vietnam War, so it fits your timeline.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[LostMyAccount]

I wonder how many of the anti-vaxxers are "cheaters" in other spheres of their life. I have this idea that anti-vaxxers believe (or know) the actual odds of their kid developing an immunizable illness are very low, but they think it will give them an advantage to not expose them to a vaccine -- it's the best of both words, no autism/vaccine risk and the disease risk is very low.

It's like just another sociopathic behavior trait common among the well-educated/wealthy. They probably cheat on their taxes, maybe on their spouses, and are generally willing to break the rules if they can get away with it and get something out of it.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[thegarbz]

And yet what you just said right there was that the authorities are self correcting when they get something wrong. Not sure about you but that makes them more trustworthy, and not less.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[q_e_t]

In general the advice over the last 70 years with regards to diet, exercise and smoking has been pretty consistent. Where there are adjustments to the overall pretty consistent message it gets blown out of all proportion. Plus people tend to suggest that the message is black-and-white (give up butter) when the actual advice was to reduce saturated fat overall and replace with with monounsaturated vegetable fats, not margarine. Sometimes examples like noting that butter contains a lot of saturated fat is mentioned when people are asked for examples, and the actual advice seems to be lost by turning the nuanced advice into the headline 'Butter is now bad!'.

In terms of exaggerated risk that is often due to the misunderstanding between risk, prevalence and lifetime risk. Clinicians probably don't help matters, but again it's mostly the media not understanding the science.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[q_e_t]

Often the issue is not that it is wrong, just not detailed enough. Like running is good for most people. Not those with a broken leg, though.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Mashiki]

The "better educated" that fall out of the STEM tree generally understand how vaccines work. But looking at the places where there have been outbreaks, like MMR, Chickenpox, whooping cough and so on. They seem to be mainly focused on areas where people would fall into the soft sciences and humanities. The big outbreaks here in Canada started in areas with employees who were highly educated but worked for the government(Ottawa, ON and Hull, QC), or in areas with heavy eco/progressive/liberal bents in Toronto, ON, Montreal, QC, and Vancouver, BC.

But don't worry cause we should start seeing an increase in antibiotic resistant TB, with all the 'migrants' that are being allowed entry and bypassing typical health standards for those who'd immigrate.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Aighearach]

It isn't herd immunity, you're just repeating the words because you know they're persuasive words. Not because they actually apply in the case of the flu shot.

This is exactly what I mean, why should the average idiot be able to tell the difference between real herd immunity from a smallpox vaccine, and the limited protection offered by a flu shot? Even researchers will try to lie to them to manipulate them into making the preferred choices in both cases, so it is natural and unsurprising that lots of people end up thinking that the smallpox vaccine is like the flu shot.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[sg_oneill]

My uncle used to go sky diving with a few people in Borneo back in the 80s One jump one of the guys parachute failed completely and the guy realised he was going to die, so he took off the pack completely and just relaxed apparently resigned to it.

He survived, paraplegic and in hospital for half a decade, but alive. Somehow.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[stealth_finger]

This is s common lie many school administrators will tell you, but it is patently true. The article itself stated that the non-vaxed are among the most educated in the country. How do you think they got their?

Your education level and intelligence are not related. Some of the most educated people in the world are as thick as pig shit.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[mjwx]

You might be referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like somebody who is top of their game in field A assumes their knowledge is sufficient in field B.

They may also be bad at stats and be completely unaware of it.

This.

The article didn't define "better educated". Someone with an MBA or degree in Communications knows sweet fuck all about medicine and biochemistry. Not everyone who graduates from tertiary education is smart (conversely, not everyone who takes a trade is dumb, shit, one of the smartest people I know is a hotel clerk but he fucked up his life early by getting a girl pregnant at 17). This is why your work history becomes more important than your education after a few years.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[fropenn]

There is no scientific evidence that spacing out vaccines is any safer than any other vaccination schedule. But, as long as you get them done, that's the most important thing.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[fropenn]

The only way to truly eradicate some of these infectious diseases is through extremely high vaccination rates. For example, right now there is a global effort to eradicate polio (see http://polioeradication.org/).

Polio has disabled or killed millions and millions of people throughout time. Its eradication would be an amazing, tremendous gift to the future generations of humans who would no longer ever have to suffer death and disability from polio (regardless of vaccination status). The only way eradication occurs is through extremely high vaccination rates - right now, a small number of people in a small number of countries are preventing polio eradication, but there is hope with a huge investment and substantial human effort that polio can be the next disease eradicated.

In this way, vaccination is about so much more than whether your child gets a disease. It's about whether your neighbor gets a disease, and it's about reducing the burden of infectious disease on people around the world for the rest of time. Holding back on vaccination because of an extremely low risk of vaccine injury is very selfish and shortsighted.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[Whorhay]

Last I knew the Chickenpox vaccine did not prevent shingles. The vaccine is just a tamer strain of the chickenpox, and so can still be reactivated later in life. Half of Shingles cases are people over 60, which still leaves the other half being people that are younger. The Shingles vaccine is only about 50% effective as a prevention, though it does seem to reduce the severity of the rashes when it does occur.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[laie_techie]

No, you also can't force it there. Don't like it, keep your kid at home. In Canada at least, education is a right. Forcing a vaccine isn't.

College - where is your data coming from that you must have vaccine for most colleges?

Private schools set up their own requirements (including vaccinations). You should google to see if your state requires vaccinations for college / university admissions. As an example, here are the vaccination requirements in Texas (I didn't have time to search all 50 states, DC, plus territories). Another resource is vaxopedia

Accept that in a world of freedom, not everyone will agree with you. And as much as I want others to follow my ideology (science based or not), we won't always agree. Telling someone that that if they don't vaccinate their kids, they can't go to school where YOU send your kids is ridiculous. I get the issues, but accept the consequences of a free world. Try to find another solution to work with those that aren't like you.

My sect believes in agency. We are agents unto ourselves. We can choose our actions, but we can't choose the consequences. If you choose not to be vaccinated, you will limit your college choices. If you choose to attend a school where virtually everyone is vaccinated, you limit your choices.

Re: One-eyed among the blind.

[laie_techie]

Wouldn't it also be cheaper for the recipient, at least in a privatized health care nation like the U.S.? I hear you pay for the appointment plus the treatment over there. Two appointments plus two vaccines would cost more than one appointment and two vaccines, correct?

It depends on your health insurance. Most health insurances here don't even have a co-pay for "wellness" visits (about 1 visit per year). My insurance has no out of pocket costs for required vaccines, but will charge for optional vaccinations (eg. if I want to go to Brazil, I'd have to pay for the 3-4 vaccinations required for entry into Brazil, but not on the list of vaccinations required for my state). A co-pay for a doctor appointment rarely is more than $25 with insurance, so parents need to make an informed decision.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[sjames]

Oscillating back and forth isn't correction, it's just instability.

I haven't seen any questionable pharmaceuticals come off of the market without a body count. I have seen a few harmless ones pulled without much evidence of harm, but they were GRAS and not patented.

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Quakeulf]

Who can and who cannot be vaccinated for these reasons, and why?

Re:One-eyed among the blind.

[Quakeulf]

The problem is still that naturally a lot of people aren't meant to make it. we are upsetting the natural balance by introducing more humans than the planet can sustain. I am not fine with living in a global slum where everyone ekes out a miserable existence where pollution of air and water along with cancer kills more than polio ever did, but you seem to welcome it.

Educated?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think educated the word that you're looking for. How about uselessly credentialed?

Re:Educated?

[owlaf]

I add on is my experience with a friend I lost touch with, well because you could say he is losing touch with reality. He really went done the rabbit hole of vaccines causing autism. He spent a lot time on facebook groups, and thought at one point the gov't was kicking him out of the groups. I tried to calm him down by suggesting just stay off of there for a while. His response was "I go to work and come home, that is all I have outside of work". I got the feel he didn't believe his own BS, but it gave him purpose. He went to mediocre college and has a office job now he doesn't care for. I thought about the reason for being kicked out of fb groups, and I am pretty sure it is his ex-wife. He met her through those groups. She went back to England (he is from the mid-west) to get her things, and found an argument to stay there and get a divorce. She seems nice, but he has seen her mean streak. He became involved with the fb groups because he thought food allergies, and she has had somewhat similar issues. She introduced the idea of vaccines causing autism to him

Re:Educated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Educated means that they attended enough classes or passed enough tests to attain the proper credentials. Educated is also the tool used to give anyone the inherent authority on any subject over the "uneducated". It's why the common trope for describing one's political opponent's supporters as uneducated (particularly in the last two decades).

This is also literally why every damn job requires a college degree, regardless of the degree.

Educated does not mean intelligent. It never has and it never will. That's not a slight against academic institutions (although their common usage of "educated" as being superior is), rather it's the reality that no matter how many hours someone is presented some set of material, there is no way to be sure that they truly understood it. And, more importantly, there is no way to know for sure that they will actually comprehend the knowledge taught to them versus being able to pass a test (with or without the common curves in modern classrooms) and escape the curriculum.

Re:Educated?

[Aighearach]

They might be perfectly good at their specialty, and still be complete idiots on other topics.

The implied mistake that you made is that you too are excessively credulous of the word "education," so when some average idiot is also highly educated, you want to do a No True Scotsman on their education so that you can protect the word education from the idiots.

But education might simply not imply much value when used as a label on the past. We know that they had lots of learning opportunities, and we know that they completed a lot of school work, but that is generally all we know. If they received an MA, they at least were required (one time) to write an essay that attempts to prove that they did learn something, but YMMV. If they got a PhD then they supposedly even came up with a new idea about their field, or at least wrote a long essay that was confusing enough that people think they might have. That is all "being educated" actually means, in both the best case and the worst. People such as yourself, however, want to inflate the value in some cases, and then you have to try to tear it down in other cases to protect the cases where you inflated it.

Re:Educated?

[Solandri]

I think everyone's jumping on the wrong correlation here. Affluence is probably the key factor here, not education. These are people who can afford the extra medical expenses for their kids if they do happen to get sick. So they don't vaccinate them for whatever reason, knowing that they can pay for their treatment if they happen to lose that die roll. A less wealthy person might be wary of vaccination, but knows they can't afford to have their kids get sick, so that overrides their aversion and they go ahead and get their kids vaccinated. (Note that this implies the rate of vaccination would be lower if cost were not a factor, meaning that our education about the benefit of vaccination is even more of a failure than vaccination percentages would suggest.)

The correlation with education is probably just coincidental. Both A (don't vaccinate) and B (higher education) are caused by C (more affluent).

Re:Educated?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Educated != Intelligent. Too many make that wrong causative relationship. A few of the most intelligent engineers/researchers I've worked with had a HS degree only, and I have worked with lots of dolts with too many letters after their name...

Re:Educated?

[robot5x]

I agree, affluence is definitely the key factor here. Not only because of excellent point in above post, but also because of the constant rush to be able to do things differently, as some kind of weird status symbol, to demonstrate affluence to others, probably with the side goal of appearing to be more knowledgeable.

"Yeah I could have just bought a [averagely efficient and cost effective car model] but I did my own research and really this hand-crafted, 2-seater, avocado-powered scooter is the best thing for my family. It's Goop-certified, you guys should really think about getting one."

Re:Educated?

[bluelip]

Formally Educated != intelligent

Actually, they're inversely proportional.

Re:Educated?

[Darinbob]

One can be educated without actually learning anything.

Re:Educated?

[Darinbob]

Affluence often causes a person to think that they're special as well. As in, they're not a part of the herd so they don't need herd immunity. There's also the extra free time affluence brings, time to hang out and read about conspiracy theories, time to join causes, etc.

A lot though probably is just based on social groups. Conspiracies often tend to spread by word of mouth.

Re:Educated?

[hey!]

"Uselessly credentialed" would include just about everyone.

In most US state, people aren't educated to think for themselves, they are educated to be capable of efficiently carrying out the orders of superiors. People who uncritically accept opinions from people they trust aren't some kind of accident.

Re:Educated?

[gweihir]

I add on is my experience with a friend I lost touch with, well because you could say he is losing touch with reality. He really went done the rabbit hole of vaccines causing autism.

That one is pretty extremely stupid, because it is well documented that this was science-fraud. It also was a claim that a specific vaccine only would cause autism and that a new product due to market without that problem would be available soon. Anybody that still believes that false claim is an utter moron with zero ability to do even minimal research.

Not really

[PPH]

They also appear to be the victims of a widespread misinformation campaign, the experts said.

I suppose this could be a case of 'Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.' But I'm going to go out on a limb and call BS. The affluent expect your little snot-dribblers to get vaccinated. No matter how small the risk. Just so their precious ones can benefit from herd immunity.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotally, the anti-vaxxers that I know of do not associate the concept with religion.

I say that because I cannot come up with even a remote argument to: what religion or scripture bars vaccines? If you believe in the Bible, Jesus cured ailments all the time.

The only people that I can consider an exception to that are the Quakers, and similar, who live without the benefits of modern technology. But they don't mix with the rest of society at the same time.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people have religious objections to man-made vaccines. Why do you oppose freedom to practices one's chosen religion? It's a foundational principle that the USA was built on. If you do not support it, you should make your home in a more suitable country for your beliefs.

A lot of people have religious objections to other races and cultures. Why do you oppose freedom to practices one's chosen religion? It's a foundational principle that the USA was built on. If you do not support it, you should make your home in a more suitable country for your beliefs.

Re:Not really

[Sique]

Because your freedom ends when it endangers my life.

Re:Not really

[William Baric]

No, it doesn't. According to the CDC :

In 2015, 5,376 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in the United States. [...] Additionally, almost 129,000 pedestrians were treated in emergency departments for non-fatal crash-related injuries in 2015."

Good luck trying to convince people that they should not have the freedom to drive a car, to take the bus, or to transport goods in trucks because it endangers your life.

Re:Not really

[AmiMoJo]

I dunno, there are plenty of ridiculous diets and parenting fads that the affluent get involved with. Maybe they are better educated but misinformation targeting them can still be effective if it pushes the right buttons.

It makes sense really, they have the money to invest in healthcare and so take more interest in it, which means reading a lot of BS on the internet and in magazines.

Re:Not really

[gtall]

"A lot of people have religious objections to man-made vaccines." What might those be, precisely? I do not recall Christ, or Moses, or Muhammed saying squat about medicine. I do recall a lot of pseudo-religious nutjobs running around claiming that they needed to live as in those ancient times as ancient times, a bit like the people ascribing miraculous powers to crystals. Putting your children at risk just because you have a bone-headed belief is not freedom to practice religion. It is religious indoctrination by the parent thinking that their sprogs are their property. This is the sort of thinking that gives us slavery, womens' servitude, and racism.

Re:Not really

[PPH]

If you do not support it, you should make your home in a more suitable country for your beliefs.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"

That suitable country would be this one. If you need an exception carved out of the law to practice your religion, perhaps it is you that should leave.

Re: Not really

[PPH]

like raising taxes for driving their cars

What do you have against the poor?

Re:Not really

[gravewax]

A lot of people have religious objections to man-made vaccines. Why do you oppose freedom to practices one's chosen religion? It's a foundational principle that the USA was built on. If you do not support it, you should make your home in a more suitable country for your beliefs.

You can do whatever the fuck you want in your religion. But if you want to be anti vaxxer then isolate yourself from the rest of society for life, why should my children be sacrificed to death because you of your beliefs.

Re:Not really

[kqs]

I know several anti-vax people who are that way because of their religious beliefs. But they claim that almost all of their beliefs come from their religious beliefs, even the ones which are strongly counter to examples in their Bible. So we're hitting the common divide between what people believe about their motivations, and their actual motivations.

People seem really bad at self-reflection, and really bad at taking responsibility for their beliefs and actions.

Re:Not really

[Darinbob]

Their kids aren't going to the schools that the herd goes to. Their kids go to private schools, or they've moved to an affluent school district.

Re:Not really

[Talderas]

Jehovah's Witness used to reject vaccination but revised their doctrine. They do also have the rejection of blood transfusions but they do have scripture to base that on. The religious who reject vaccinations do so because their doctrine is based on faith healing or divine providence and consequently they should be rejecting all medical care, not just vaccinations.

There may be some religious objections to vaccination that could arise based on what is required to develop vaccines but that would mostly revolve around using aborted fetal tissue and one should expect that it would be a refused against specific vaccines rather than a general anti-vaccination stance.

Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Either this 'study' is deeply flawed, or it's actually the product of the Russian trolls it speaks of, since this makes precisely zero sense, someone not vaccinating their kids against common diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'. Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Oh look everyone, an anti-vaxxer!

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

Educated does not equate to intelligence.

It's safe to say that everyone reading this knows enough dumb people with fancy education backgrounds to recognize the difference once it's pointed out.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Sique]

We have a typical case of "only the dangers I see are important".

As measles and polio and rubella and all the other illnesses we vax again are (thanks to the vaccination) no longer in plain sight, people tend to underestimate their risk. As we easily can imagine the piercing hurting the child, the wound becoming infected, the child misreacting on the vaccines and so on, we tend to overestimate their risk. Thus we want to protect the child against the perceived danger and not against the real danger.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Aighearach]

Stop trying to leave yourself behind, everybody can receive a college education if they work at it long and hard enough.

What that means is, being educated doesn't imply increased intelligence. It implies increased time spent as a student. That and only that.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Ol Olsoc]

Either this 'study' is deeply flawed, or it's actually the product of the Russian trolls it speaks of, since this makes precisely zero sense, someone not vaccinating their kids against common diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'. Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.

It seems dreadfully flawed to me. And seems to make an assumption that education and money equal smartness.

And it warmer down south than it is in the winter.

The anti-vaxx movement is merely another target to hate, like antifa or smokers or Hillary's emails or Trump's whatever. Pick your target.

Now I don't really care if anti-vaxxers decide to re-enact Jonestown, but I do have sympathy for their children, as well as for immunocompromised children who are at risk because of the loss of herd immunity.

This ain't right. Every study undertaken since that asshole Wakefield joined in a lie along with a lawyer to get wealthy from jury sympathy for people with autistic children has shown no relationship between autism and vaccines.

And outbreaks and death follow every episode of vaccine hesitancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... But there we have apparently affluent mommy with her sign "My Child, My Choice". Okay - at some point, you lose your choice.

I'd like to point out this little girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kid had all of her limbs partially amputated due to meningococcus.

If I was her, the second I attained the age of majority, I would set out to use every legal means available to systematically, slowly, and completely destroy my parents, and I would enjoy aand publicise ever event of their ongoing destruction.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[iggymanz]

not anti-vax at all

there are known and proven cases around the world of harmful improperly prepared vaccine

but you're quick to label people instead of using your mind

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Fine. Right back at you, you're a 'foe' of our species if you support people being wilfully ignorant. No truly intelligent educated person can refute the overall positive effects of immunization.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Somewhere above you in this thread someone is actually citing rare, outlier cases of vaccines "not being prepared properly" and other unlikely things as valid reasoning to NOT vaccinate kids, but as I and now you are pointing out, the overall positive outcome for our species as a whole is what matters here. Anti-vaxxers are the root cause behind some diseases that we otherwise thought were thoroughly erradicated coming back and causing current epidemics. In 2019 there is precisely ZERO reason for any kid to get measles or whooping cough or polio. It's embarassing that these things are happening here in a first-world country, embarassing that any actual adults are making such bad decisions that are behind this happening.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gtall]

No it isn't an obvious definition of unintelligent. As someone above mentioned, it could easily result from the affluent thinking the proles need the vaccines so they can surf the herd-immunity. If anything, it is self-absorbed selfish behavior.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[thegarbz]

diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'

Neither the study nor the summary of it mentions intelligence.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gravewax]

don't confuse education with intelligence!

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[meglon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Opportunist]

If you don't get vaccinated against some disease that only exists in some godforsaken corner of the world and you don't plan to even remotely go there, that's sensible. But we're not talking about something like this. We are talking about a highly contagious disease that exists right here, with a chance of 1:1,000 to have a severe, potentially life threatening or permanently lasting negative impact on an infected, with an incidence rate of less than 1:1,000,000 for ANY side effects of the vaccination.

If it was the other way around, I'd be right with you. If the infection chance was low and the chance for complication around 1:1,000,000 with vaccination complications being higher than this (as is the case with some of the rarer influenza strains), whether getting vaccinated is debatable at least, or something that only makes sense for people with an elevated infection risk.

But with measles it's a no brainer.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[kqs]

No truly intelligent educated person can refute the overall positive effects of immunization.

That is a very intelligent statement.

Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.

And that is not an intelligent statement.

"Intelligence" is not a binary state. People are intelligent about many things and self-deceiving about others. Actually, sometimes about the same things.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

So I'm supposed to 'respect the opinions' of people who side with anti-vaxxers? I don't think so.
Also do you actually think I'm some sort of Stealth Slashdot Administrator who can delete people's responses? LOL, no, of course I'm not, anti-vaxxers and the people who for whatever reasons support their nonsense can and have posted their hate of what I said; my stating 'I don't give a damn what you think so don't bother' is my way of saying "you're not going to bully, troll, or shame me into changing my viewpoint on this issue", and for the record: I will NOT change my viewpoint on this issue for anyone or any reason. The 'anti-vaxxer' crowd are, in my opinion, flat-out ignorant, and furthermore a danger to public safety, and the results of their ill-considered decisions to not vaccinate their kids has led to outbreaks of diseases that could have been avoided. There is no defense for what they have done. This is not negotiable.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Thank you for being the Voice of Reason in an apparent wilderness of idiocy.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Rick Schumann]

Honestly, if someone has an IQ well over average and a college education and they're an anti-vaxxer, I'm stunned, and the only possible explanation is that they're horribly gullible and fell prey to fake news. But even then that doens't get them off the hook for not vaccinating their kids. 'Choice' can't be in play in something like this.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Sique]

Of course it happens sometimes. Still, you vastly overestimate the number of cases and the severity, while you totally underestimate the risk associated for instance with rubella. When I was a child, I had several friends in kindergarten or in elementary school that had valvular heart disease because their mothers got infected with rubella when they were pregnant. In one case, it was, because the elder sibling caught rubella in kindergarten and infected his mother while she was carrying her younger son. Later, I was in a sports club for canoe slalom, and one of young men there never trained with us, but was there very often. He had polio, when he was younger, and while he luckily wasn't bound to a wheelchair all the time (he could walk alright), he couldn't sit in a canoe.

With those examples out of sight, many parents can't even imagine the problems associated with not vaccinating, all they see are reports how vaccines have been recalled, or when talking with other parents, how their child was feeling sick for three days after a shot.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Darinbob]

I think in today's first world societies, the scary diseases of the past don't seem that scary now. Measles sounds like chicken pox, German measles sounds like just a variant, whooping cough sounds like just a cough, etc. The fear of these diseases has shrunk. In the meantime a lot of other things seem scarier than they used to in the past - parents have a dread about autism now.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gweihir]

Education and intelligence are not enough. You need to be willing to use them in addition and many people do not have that quality. I like to call it "wisdom".

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gweihir]

Don't confuse intelligence with wisdom. All the education and intelligence in the world is worthless if you _chose_ not to use it and most people do. They rather run with whatever idea makes them feel good.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gweihir]

Not in relevant numbers. If you look at what vaccines prevent, you get a distance of several orders of magnitude in _individual_ risk. Hence your argument is complete bullshit. You must be one of those "educated" people that never managed to actually use said education on real-world problems.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gweihir]

That would be an argument of the type "the Nazis did medical experiment on prisoners, so _all_ medical experiments are wrong", now would it? The argumentation technique of somebody utterly incapable of seeing reality.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[gweihir]

Indeed. It nicely illustrates the key problem of the human race though: Most people are embarrassingly dumb. You can trace basically every major problem back to that.

Re:Study must be deeply flawed

[Mashiki]

Either this 'study' is deeply flawed, or it's actually the product of the Russian trolls it speaks of, since this makes precisely zero sense, someone not vaccinating their kids against common diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'. Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.

No it makes perfect sense, especially if you believe that education = intelligence. Honestly, your comment comes off as someone lacking world(ly) experience more then anything. Most people learn pretty quickly intelligence and education rarely do meet, and in most cases the stupidest people you'll ever meet are the most educated.

Huh?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Randall Munroe seems fairly well educated in technical areas. Did I miss something? And, from my understanding,he's open and upfront that his comics aren't based just on his knowledge but that he has to do research fro them.

And I never heard anyone claim Ricky Gervais is particularly smart. Maybe you were confused by his accent into thinking people thought he was smart?/p:

intellect != well educated.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article claims that:

The decision to fly in the face of near universal scientific opinion doesn't come as a result of a lack of intellect, however, as experts who have studied vaccines and immunology acknowledge that many parents who don't vaccinate their children are well-educated.

Which is asinine. There's many ways to be smart, and many entirely different ways to be educated. A degree in business administration or economics gives you no insight into not getting fooled by dumbass anti-vaxxers or various conspiracy theories. In fact, it may make it easier, since they're "educated" and don't think they can be fooled! It's just as easy to trick so-called "educated" people as it is non-educated people. The only difference is the bait you use.

One of the reasons this anti-vaxxer stuff gets spread is we live in a world where we're taught that science is things printed in books, arguments that "sound right" rather than actually being educated on critical thinking skills, evidence based, and degrees of certainty.

Educated but stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Higher educated, does not mean not stupid.

Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[DalM]

Remember when it was just the religious right that was anti-science? Ah, those were the days. We could just mock them behind their backs and call then neanderthals. Ha ha. Oh, nostalgia.

Turns out "religion" had nothing to do with it after all. A certain percentage of people will just believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of ethnicity, religion or economic status. Looking back, wasn't that always the case?

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[Cmdln Daco]

It turns out that the majority of the people who are pro-vaccination do not have the scientific background to do anything more than believe what the experts say, either.

I am not against vaccination, I am just sayin.

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[Aighearach]

Remember when people were so dumb and racist that they presumed Neandertals were stupid, just because they were shown a chart that said they were "different" than "modern" humans? ROFLCOPTER

A certain percentage of people will just believe whatever they are told. Especially if you add an ethnicity, religion, or economic status to the people discussed. Looking back, wasn't that always the case?

--Signed, Prominent Occipital Bun

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[Ol Olsoc]

Remember when it was just the religious right that was anti-science?

Umm, no I don't. It's been long known that the distribution of anti-vaxxers was a pretty equal mix of Conservative and Liberal.

Different reasons, but equally stupid reasons.

Stupidity knows no political affiliation.

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[DalM]

Being able to understand and apply "what the experts say" about a particular topic is literally the definition of intelligence.

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[DalM]

Thank you. I wasn't sure I got my own point.

Re: Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[DalM]

I don't believe that.

Re:Remember when it was just the Religous Right?

[Ol Olsoc]

Thank you. I wasn't sure I got my own point.

You wrote: "Remember when it was just the religious right that was anti-science?

It never was just the religious right.

Occasionally the kooks on the left and right align. Another example is the sex negative feminists and the religious right uniting on porn. The right thinks it's a tool of Satan, and the sex negative feminists think it demeans women.

But they are all still kooks.

Re: And "progressive", no doubt

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly, yes - the antivax idiocy started in California after all. The wealthy, or at least pretending to wealth parts, not the homeless slums or hick farmers.

Unfortunately, it has spread to the right as well. Not as easily or widely, but make no mistake, the fucktardery of antivax is spreading like the diseases vaccinations prevent.

bullshit

[DogDude]

There's plenty of issues people have with vaccines that are based in science

Like what, exactly?

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

Adverse effects (usually around one in a million for most vaccines for severe adverse reactions, one in ten for most mild ones). Correlation here is risk calculation and game theory, not "stupid parents".

First of all, remind yourself that wealthy parents in upper middle class tend to have only one child. That means that "all their eggs are in one basket". That leads to complete change of risk calculation for the child - even utterly minor things like child getting kidnapped by a satanist cult, or severe adverse reaction from the vaccine become meaningful rather than irrelevant.

Note that people in this category do tend to demand absurd levels of safety assurances for their children in those other fields, and not just vaccinations. Correlation is there.

Second is basic game theory. When overwhelming majority of people around you are altruistic (i.e. vaccinated) it makes sense to be egotistical and not take the risks of vaccinating your child, relying on herd immunity instead.

Correlation is visible in the fact that when herd immunity does break and there's an outbreak, numbers of parents choosing not to vaccinate collapse dramatically.

Re:bullshit

[Anne Thwacks]

The risk of meningococcal infection is at its highest during college years, and the consequence of infection can be a very rapid death. Most countries don't require it because people would rather their college kids didn't die. Americans are obviously different.

Re:bullshit

[smoot123]

Adverse effects (usually around one in a million for most vaccines for severe adverse reactions, one in ten for most mild ones). Correlation here is risk calculation and game theory, not "stupid parents".

First of all, remind yourself that wealthy parents in upper middle class tend to have only one child. That means that "all their eggs are in one basket".

I think it's closer to two children but that doesn't really change your point. Both rug rats are precious snowflakes.

What I think is missing is the alternative risk. Say there's a one in a million risk for a serous complication (I have no idea whether that's correct and what the complication might be. I do know autism isn't one of the possible complications.) What are the chances of getting measles without the vaccine? Apparently slightly higher than one in a million because we have more than 300 cases in Washington alone.

Given that measles can kill you, I'm not sure it's all that clear cut that your snowflakes are safer without the shot.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

Autism, to my knowledge, is the "haha look at these dumb right wing nut job parents" that modern hysteria-chasing media is selling this as. These people do exist, but they appear to be a fairly small minority in this particular issue.

The actual problem is mentioned in the OP - upper middle class, well educated and smart parents. Notably, you just failed the relevant risk assessment, because you failed to note the fact that as long as herd immunity holds, risk is effectively zero. You cannot contract a disease that doesn't exist within contagious range of you. It's only when the game theoretical scenario of "everyone around me is an altruist, therefore I should be an egoist" is figured out by sufficient amount of people in the same area that herd immunity begins to fail. So the conditions that appear to be needed to trigger this particular issue is a combination of understanding of risk assessment and game theory coupled with overestimation/underestimation of your neighbours.

Places such as those that concentrate a lot of highly educated ideologically very far modern left likely fit because they have what appears to be significant self selected over-representation of outliers in terms of actual high intelligence, high mathematical and logical reasoning skill, and diminished social skills. Upper end of intelligence curve has a significantly elevated tendency to come with significant downsides when it comes to mathematical capabilities in terms of lack of social skills. That means that those are extremely intelligent people that have problems reading people. This profile would also match the recently risen problem with draconian thought control in many Silicon Valley giants. "We don't care about context, we just care about individual words" is literally the problem many of the people who are highly functional autists have in real life, because they have problems comprehending the social context of things being said and done by other people. That's literally what that condition is.

And such people make brilliant workers for IT companies.

As for serious complications for vaccinations, those are really nasty effects, that usually have a significant life long effect if you survive them. Autism is long debunked click bait distraction here. Real problems are things like severe immune system conditions. But they are genuinely one a million or so risk for most modern vaccines given to children. And yet, when you scale it to US for example, statistic projection suggests that there's around 400 people with those conditions who are alive and suffering or dead because of them. And that's just the extremely serious end. Less serious but still very damaging items on the "diverse effects" list are usually around 1/10.000 to 1/100.000. Former would mean around 40.000 people in US. That's no longer an insignificant number.

Final factor in the risk assessment formula is the risk of actually suffering the nastier effects of those illnesses. In case of measles for example, death is about 1/10.000 with proper medical care. Contrast with diverse effects and you'll see where this argument is going.

Which is likely why the modern programs aimed at "eliminating anti-vaccination movement" fail miserably. They're targeting the "anti-vaxxers" known in popular culture, the fairly uneducated families who tend to talk about conspiracy theories. They fail to target what appears to be intelligent upper middle class people who make the aforementioned risk assessment.

Re:bullshit

[dryeo]

People in general are really shitty at judging risks. Look at how many parents drive their kids to school to avoid the risk of stranger kidnapping.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

I addressed this in the follow up post.

>The actual problem is mentioned in the OP - upper middle class, well educated and smart parents. Notably, you just failed the relevant risk assessment, because you failed to note the fact that as long as herd immunity holds, risk is effectively zero. You cannot contract a disease that doesn't exist within contagious range of you. It's only when the game theoretical scenario of "everyone around me is an altruist, therefore I should be an egoist" is figured out by sufficient amount of people in the same area that herd immunity begins to fail. So the conditions that appear to be needed to trigger this particular issue is a combination of understanding of risk assessment and game theory coupled with overestimation/underestimation of your neighbours.

>Places such as those that concentrate a lot of highly educated ideologically very far modern left likely fit because they have what appears to be significant self selected over-representation of outliers in terms of actual high intelligence, high mathematical and logical reasoning skill, and diminished social skills. Upper end of intelligence curve has a significantly elevated tendency to come with significant downsides when it comes to mathematical capabilities in terms of lack of social skills. That means that those are extremely intelligent people that have problems reading people. This profile would also match the recently risen problem with draconian thought control in many Silicon Valley giants. "We don't care about context, we just care about individual words" is literally the problem many of the people who are highly functional autists have in real life, because they have problems comprehending the social context of things being said and done by other people. That's literally what that condition is.

>And such people make brilliant workers for IT companies.

Re:bullshit

[Uberbah]

meningococcal vaccination. The problem is this this vaccine is only effective for about 3-4 years. Most other countries don't require this vaccination. It doesn't really do any harm, but the good it does is questionable.

Maybe they don't make it mandatory because other countries aren't as stupid when it comes to anti-vaxxing? Like how you'll sometimes hear southerners complain that other states don't have law against cousins marrying. It's not because it's acceptable in those other states, it's because it wasn't such a problem that they had to pass laws against it.

Re:bullshit

[Uberbah]

Adverse effects (usually around one in a million for most vaccines for severe adverse reactions, one in ten for most mild ones). Correlation here is risk calculation and game theory, not "stupid parents".

It's as stupid at risk assessment as a guy who rides a motorcycle without a helmet, but refuses to get on an airplane because he's afraid of a crash.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

Keep reading the replies. You're the third one to point this issue, and I have addressed it twice already.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

This is fairly advanced human biology/psychology. Establishing rules for safety of everyday activity vs exceedingly rare activity people have little to no experience in happens as completely different processes. This is an evolutionary adaptation that exists across essentially every entity that has a brain that consists of two hemispheres, because processing related to the rare unknown event happens in a different hemisphere, using completely different neural systems than processing known events.

It's why one of the biggest risks to our lives today, driving, is considered safe by vast majority of people - it's a known element and is processed as such. All while things that are very safe, but done only very rarely are feared by a notable minority, because to our brain, it's an unknown thing that must be processed completely differently.

Re:bullshit

[fropenn]

Lots of US colleges (perhaps most) require this vaccine as a condition for living in the on-campus residence halls.

Re:bullshit

[apol]

Here is a list of articles and publications, most of them pointing issues in vaccines and in what is commonly said about them. For me it is a very good entry point for those interested in criticism against vaccines, no matter if you are against vaccines or if you are just curious to know the arguments. Of course most of the articles and claims are categorized as pseudo-science (IMO it is such a sensitive issue that any criticism to vaccines is labeled as anti-science or pseudo-science even before their arguments are appropriately considered).

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/se...

Re:bullshit

[Areyoukiddingme]

Less serious but still very damaging items on the "diverse effects" list are usually around 1/10.000 to 1/100.000. Former would mean around 40.000 people in US. That's no longer an insignificant number.

Final factor in the risk assessment formula is the risk of actually suffering the nastier effects of those illnesses. In case of measles for example, death is about 1/10.000 with proper medical care. Contrast with diverse effects and you'll see where this argument is going.

What you left out of that analysis is that as more and more morons make that flawed risk assessment, the odds of death being 1/10000 changes dramatically for the worse. The odds are 1/10000 with historically high vaccination rates. Change the rate for the worse and you'll discover many more deaths, which changes that foolish odds of death evaluation.

If everyone stopped vaccinating for the worst childhood diseases, literally millions of children would die. Population density is so high that all of the worst diseases would spread like wildfire through an unvaccinated population. It would be a disaster of biblical proportions.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

Your type of a person are one of the primary reasons why it's been so utterly hard to convince anti-vaxxer crowd to change their mind.

Not only are you incapable of comprehending the argument made above at all, you're also utterly horrible at relevant math, as 1/10.000 is for people who contracted the diseases regardless of vaccination status. Which means that vaccination status is irrelevant for that particular ratio, but you also call people who are actually in top five percentile if not higher of entire population in terms of intelligence "morons".

So when people like that hear opinionated and ignorant fools like yourself advocate for vaccination with all the crudeness of yours, they are reinforced in their views. After all, if arguments are made by ignorant fools who can't even comprehend basic math or who think that observable top intelligence people in the society are "morons", why would you give any arguments against their stance any consideration? It's all made by clearly observably foolish people like you after all.

And then, we get the outbreaks in such communities, and they vaccinate after it occurs, because of factors mentioned above. Because unlike you, they're actually far smarter than you in terms of relevant theory. They're just really bad at understanding other people.

Re:bullshit

[Areyoukiddingme]

I understood it fine. And I understood the errors in it, unlike you. There are loads of people in the top five percentile of the entire population who are utter morons at statistics. You are failing at statistics by failing to distinguish dependent and independent variables. You believe the variables are independent. They are not. That's the flaw in your analysis.

Fool.

Re:bullshit

[Luckyo]

In your desperate need to call me a fool, you managed to once again show how utterly idiotic you are, as you once again failed to notice that your entire complaint has been long ago addressed.

All while being very, very sure that you're right.

Which is why people like you are a severe detriment to any causes they champion.

Education is not equal to intelligence

[grasshoppa]

I've met people who have plenty of fancy letters after their names, and they're dumb as rocks. They studied deep in a single field, but can only regurgitate knowledge, not integrate and extrapolate.

The more life I experience, the more I realize just how truly rare intelligence is.

No

[nospam007]

Just because you inherited money and your dad paid for a new library at Harvard doesn't mean that you aren't a stupid fuck.

It's not that simple

[DogDude]

Looking back, wasn't that always the case?

No, I don't think it's that simple. Religion, by definition, is deliberate ignorance: believe something that has no basis in reality because it has no basis in reality. I don't know a whole heck of a lot of truly smart people who are also religious. I honestly don't know if I know any.

But, religion is becoming passe. It's dying off quickly in more educated, modern societies (ie: Europe). Without religion, some people still have some sort of innate need to believe in something irrational, because the idea of "this is all there is" is just too much (or not enough?) for them. I think that these people who need something else, but who can't buy into the magical sky wizard thing are grasping at all sorts of things, and some of those things are online Internet conspiracies.

Personally, I think that life as we know it is plenty interesting enough for me, so I don't understand why so many people need to look past that and believe in some sort of silly mumbo jumbo.

Re:It's not that simple

[apoc.famine]

So, what part of the south are you from, Dallas May?

Re: It's not that simple

[DalM]

If you don't know any Intelligent religious people then 1) you are completely ignorant about how many of the Intelligent people you know are also religious, 2) don't know any Intelligent people, 3) have simply surrounded yourself by your own echo-chamber bubble, 4) you are simply lying to some random internet stranger to justify your own belief and bigotry.

All options are equally plausible. Since you immediately reject all of the above options, my bet is that you are lying and don't even work for any research University at all.

Re: It's not that simple

[DalM]

I mean wow. Do you really not hear how bigoted you are. You literally just said that you don't know any intelligent Jews.

Wow.

Re: It's not that simple

[DogDude]

For the sake of conversation, you'll have to assume I'm telling the truth. Otherwise, why are you participating in this web site?

It's entirely possible that I don't realize that some of the very smart people I know are also religious, but I kind of doubt it. Talking to a woo-woo imaginary sky wizard(s) after a lifetime of education and critical thinking doesn't really make much sense. Somebody who devotes their life to truth probably isn't going to also spend much of their life dedicated to the exact opposite of truth ("belief" based on a lack of evidence). I'm sure there are some people who do, but I don't know any.

On the other hand, you seem to be very upset about this idea. Can you explain why you think an intelligent person would choose to pretend to talk to a imaginary "gods"?

Re: It's not that simple

[DalM]

That's easy to explain.

Many many many brilliant people throughout history have believed in all kinds of gods and religions.

Why do you think Jews and Muslims can't be intelligent?

Re:It's not that simple

[Cederic]

I don't know a whole heck of a lot of truly smart people who are also religious.

Several of the most intelligent (and best educated) people I know adhere strongly to their religious practices.

Whether they actually believe any of that shit is something I'm very kind and don't press them on, but they're heavily into the 'must do' / 'must not do' shite purely on archaic superstitious grounds.

Re:It's not that simple

[DogDude]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Re: It's not that simple

[Strider-]

You’re working on the false assumption that religion and science contradict each other. They only do so in certain, narrow, interpretations. Conversely, someone like myself looks at the two as being orthogonal. Science doesn’t deny God, God doesn’t deny science and logic. This is especially true when you get into the mainline denominations (Episcopal, ELCA Lutheran, UCC, RC, etc...). When I was a University student at a major, public university, a significant portion of the professors and doctoral students were also religious. There is no cognitive dissonance here.

But anyway, I know that you’re not going to read this or accept this, so I guess the whole argument is moot.

Re: It's not that simple

[SuiteSisterMary]

Any religion that espouses 'faith' is, by definition, contradictory to science. The moment you take anything on 'faith,' which is to say 'belief without evidence,' you've rejected science.

The real trouble, of course, is that belief without evidence' must inevitably turn to belief despite evidence.'

Re:It's not that simple

[Areyoukiddingme]

Whether they actually believe any of that shit is something I'm very kind and don't press them on, but they're heavily into the 'must do' / 'must not do' shite purely on archaic superstitious grounds.

They believe, correctly, that "when in Rome, rub blue mud into your bellybutton," as Robert Heinlein put it. They are signaling community status in what they believe to be an advantageous community just as hard as they can. It's probably working for them too.

The ones who do it most aggressively have convinced themselves they actually do believe the practices are necessary. Belief often works that way, for those capable of it. Not being capable of belief myself, I don't really understand those who do, but I know they can do that to themselves.

social media responsible ?

[swell]

Sorry to drag social media into the fray again, but it may have undue influence. The poorest, most ignorant people don't use social media much. When the doctor, or some authority, tells them to get vaccinations, they obey.

But those steeped in social media see lots of opinions, lots of controversy, lots of fake news. When an authority tells them to get vaccinations, they think they know better.

'All's fair in love and war', they say. Raising children is a very emotional activity. Parents tend to be protective and sometimes paranoid about obscure threats to their children. Rationality is sometimes overlooked when they find urgent online pleas to avoid vaxxing.

I work with illiterate adults, helping them to be readers. They are very docile and will do what doctors tell them to do. The rest of us are too smart to fall for that blind obedience trap.

Fixed it for you

[Anonymous Coward]

"Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Kids Tend To Be Arrogant"

"Well-educated"...

[fbobraga]

... means are funny: "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" :P

Caviar

[mentil]

If the plebeians can't afford it, it must be superior! Just like I am! Oh, ho ho ho ho! /s

Re: show butthoal

[Lenny369]

Note the lack of argument. They cant even come up with a strawman for this one.

"educated" != "understands how things work"

[gweihir]

There are a lot of highly educated morons around. Some of them even have high intelligence. Does not matter. The problem is one of wisdom, in the sense of what to apply education and intelligence to. A lot of humans will just prefer their misconceptions even when they are educated end intelligent enough to easily verify what is actually true and what is not. The human tragedy at work: They could know better, but they _chose_ to not find out what is true.

Re:"educated" != "understands how things work"

[Opportunist]

It's experience, if anything. Do you know any anti-vacc'er above the age of 80? Won't find one. Why? Because they DO remember what an iron lung looks like. And they probably saw a sibling in one.

Re:"educated" != "understands how things work"

[gweihir]

Well, yes. However if you need personal experience for a risk that is well understood and documented, then you have failed as an intellectual being. Not that this is not the normal mode most people live their lives in...

Re:"educated" != "understands how things work"

[Opportunist]

I agree. But some kids need that very personal experience of a hot stove.

So it's settled

[Opportunist]

It's not the dumb fucks but the selfish assholes. Gotcha.

As in smoked, or as in Rushdie?

[Hognoxious]

At one point it's Salmon, and later it's Salman.

Re:They are intelligent because they are liberal

[meglon]

....and you're the definition of a partisan piece of shit. I don't give a fuck if they're conservative or liberal, anti-vaxxers are fucking idiots.... like you, only for a different reason. And no, they're not "almost all" liberals, only a stupid fucking idiot would say that when you have all these religious conservatives refusing to vaccinate their kids against HPV. But then, you are a partisan piece of shit.. so there's that.

Pharma hides data so people distrust them

[misnohmer]

Vaccination manufacturers don't make data available available, or at least actuarial data that any insurance company would trust. Insurance companies will insure almost anything - a jewelry store in Vancouver, BC, pays insurance against more than some number of centimeters of snow falling in January, and if that happens, the insurance company refunds all their customers purchases from December (actually happened once). However, after our first-born had a major reaction as a child to a vaccination and needed an inhaler for a couple of years (luckily it cleared up, or so we think) for our second child I asked what the odds of such reaction. The doc was quick to tell me "one in a million or less". I asked whether the pharma company or any insurance company will insure me with those odds - I'd give them 2:1 on their money, $100 for $50M payoff, heck, I'd settle for lifetime healthcare paid by the pharma in case my kid has a reaction (lifetime value likely much less than $50M). Guess what, no takers. So I call bullshit on the number, and sorry, will not be using product pushed by doctors which will not provide me with real risk data. If the data was real, the pharma could make tons of money insuring against such reactions, and parents would be comforted that they are covered in case their kid ends up the "one in a million".

For those ready to mod this down, care to provide a source where parents can insure against vaccination side effects at the claimed 1:1,000,000 ratio of premium to claim benefit?

Re:Pharma hides data so people distrust them

[tmh - The Mad Hacker]

That it snowed is a provable fact. By contrast, you don't expect an insurance payout because a vaccine caused a chronic malfunction in your child -- you want a payout because you *think* or *claim* that it did; and as soon as word gets out that there's money to be had, suddenly a lot more people will be making the same claim, legitimate or not. Why is medical malpractice insurance insurance insanely high? It's not because of a high incidence of malpractice -- sure, there *are* legitimate claims, but it's the crackhead that ODs and then blames the doctor because her baby died as a result, and all of those other fun cases that normal people shake their heads at. Unless the insurance company is itching to get into a new line of business that involves very rapidly-evolving risk estimates/rates and lots of litigation, I can see where they'd shy away from such a thing.

Re: show butthoal

[dgatwood]

Do you get a smallpox vaccine? No, smallpox was eradicated.

Unless you are working in labs that maintain samples of smallpox for research, this is probably true. That said, if a new outbreak ever occurs somehow (e.g. cross-species transmission), then being able to rapidly ramp up those immunizations could be pretty important.

Do you get a chicken pox vaccine when you already had chicken pox? Probably not. The efficacy of having had chicken oox is better understood than the efficacy of the vaccine.

Actually, that's untrue. People who have previously been infected by chickenpox need a vaccine booster later in life. The chickenpox virus is never completely eliminated from the human body, and as a result, it can resurface in the form of shingles, a painful and debilitating condition that affects a million people per year in the United States alone. Given that the chickenpox vaccine was not approved for use in the U.S. until 1995, exactly zero percent of the main at-risk age group (elderly) were vaccinated as a kid, which is to say that (approximately) all cases of shingles occur in people who had chickenpox, not the vaccine. But periodic booster vaccination can prevent it from occurring/recurring.

Do you get your second dose of gardasil as a child? No, you get it later in life assuming you even want it or some guideline has not changed.

Huh? Like all vaccines, protection lasts for a period of time.

I would ask that you idiots please stop talking about vaccines as though they were some monolithic thing that everybody gets from big brother.

Vaccines aren't all the same, but they are pretty darn similar except for the virus itself. They confer an immunity to a particular virus and similar viruses for a period of time. They must periodically be supplemented by a booster if continued immunity is required, and mutation of viruses can result in less or no protection (e.g. influenza). The only questions you need to ask are:

• Am I at any real risk of exposure to that virus?

That's it. There's really only a single factor to consider when deciding whether to be vaccinated. People who go to countries that have more viruses need more immunizations. People in the U.S. need fewer (but still more than none). And when groups of people refuse to get immunized, the herd immunity of the society they live in is reduced, and everyone is at greater risk of dying from what would otherwise be an entirely preventable disease.

They Are Not Bright Or Educated

[JimSadler]

More affluent families tend to have women at home who can afford maids and cooks and have way too much time on their hands. Among other things they have oodles of time to contact mayors, principals, senators etc.. The also have time to read absurd books and magazines and watch the latest idiotic feel good shows on TV. What they get is directly opposite being educated and it implies a fairly weak mind to believe the nonsense. They also accept no responsibility for the deaths and horrors that they cause. The flaw in the system is that everyone has a right to an opinion yet no one has responsibility for the great harms done by their opinions. The lower class could be manipulated by Trump. This upper middle class falls victim to junk science. So if they get cancer they may just read the National Inquirer rather than rushing to an oncologist. And why not ? The National Inquirer seems to have a new cancer cure every fifteen minutes or so.

Not better educated

[techdolphin]

Perhaps more educated. Definitely not better educated.

see Dr. Ben Carson for a perfect example of this

[Uberbah]

You don't get to be the head of pediatric brain surgery at Johns Hopkins before you're freaking 40 by being Dr. Nick. He's a brilliant brain surgeon....but any other topic and Ben is dumb as a sack of hammers.

Couple possible reasons why

[CptJeanLuc]

I am guessing some of the more educated people are more likely to overthink things, and fall into the trap that "I am smart, I know better slash I can work things out for myself". Combine a solid lack of knowledge regarding how disease spreads, how immunity works, herd immunity and statistics - with an unhealthy dose of scepticism regarding how "the man" is trying to get you to put things in your bloodstream that you don't know what contains - plus the entirely failed statistics of "some random child somewhere in America had a vaccine and got sick" combined with a lack of understanding of causality - and you get those anti-vaxxers. Plus there is the idea that being subjected to a disease somehow makes your immune system "stronger".

So you take a cocktail of misunderstandings how the world works, put that in a container (brain) which totally overestimates its own abilities to figure out things in a complex world - and voila, out comes an idiot decision.

Plus there may also be an unhealthy dose of "we are smart people, we have good hygiene, we have strong genes ... my children don't need vaccines (and thus implicitly: like those other filthy kids)".

Truly smart people understand how little they know and why. I wouldn't say those anti-vaxxers are very educated people. They have lots of credits, yes. But their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.

Re: show butthoal

[edris90]

Because 3% being affected is better then then the alternative of letting the desease go rampant and affect everybody to a much greater degree , even unto permenent debilitation, or even death. including the 3% that we're being affected adversely by the vaccine. It's still better then without it. But if rich white Americans want to help stamp out their culture, all I can say is thank you very much. It's about time they'll help clean up your mess.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

Most pro-vaxxers have never considered that the anti-vaxxers might be correct. The anti-vaxxers have plenty of evidence because they have to in order to back their position. The pro-vaxxers are all parroting the medical establishment which is just saying "do what we tell you and because science". It's sad and disturbing and so stupid.

Re: show butthoal

[MancunianMaskMan]

ok so your kid has a good reason not to take vaccination.

But so do the precious entitled white middle class kids of anti-vaxx parents who also want a free ride on herd immunity.

Karma Burn....

[Ada_Rules]

Vaccinations should not be mandatory but self-injecting vaccines should be available for same day delivery on Amazon prime.

Re:Small polio outbreak is needed

[gweihir]

I am reluctant to say people that need this have "minds", but yes. Most people need to be hit over the head several times and be kicked in the gut in addition to be willing to accept something blatantly obvious they wish to ignore.

Re:Aconite

[Ol Olsoc]

Aconite is well-known to modern medicine. Given it's toxicity, it's not used for medicinal purposes in the West.

Yes, the therapeutic dose is not far from the toxic dose. But using the patches, it becomes pretty difficult to poison yourself.

Bear in mind, for myself, almost any amount of opioids are toxic. This represents a real problem for me with long term pain management.

I suppose there is always the 45 caliber pain killer if it gets to be too much. That one always works.

"University" educated

[sproketboy]

Does not count anymore.

Re:Original Sin

[dgatwood]

Regarding shingles, the problem with the chicken pox vaccine is that it destroys the NATURAL "herd" immunity. Previously parents and grandparents would be re-exposed and get natural boosters.

The problem with that is that not everybody is a parent or grandparent. The vaccine does not destroy the natural herd immunity. It augments it in people who otherwise would not be exposed.

There are two types of T cells. T1 and T2. You need a balance of both to have a good immune response. Almost all vaccines only stimulate the T2 system, making "anti-bodies".

That's complete crap. First, Th1 and Th2 responses overlap; both are responsible for creating antibodies, and vaccines inherently stimulate both. Anyone saying otherwise is almost twenty years behind in his or her medical understanding. Further, neither T1 nor T2 are responsible for long-term immunity; the follicular helper cell, Tfh, is.

The body is complex. The environment is complex. It is complete hubris to think that we can wipe out all pathogens.

And because things are hard, we should not try? With that attitude, we would not have satellites. We would not have computers. We would not have automobiles. It might be hubris to think we can succeed, but it is complete defeatism to think we cannot do any better than we have already done.

There are sound religious, scientific, and social reasons to be skeptical of vaccines.

No, there are not sound scientific reasons to be skeptical of vaccines. Decades and decades of vaccines bringing previously mass-fatality diseases to their knees tell us that vaccines work. Do they work for everything? No. See also influenza. But science tells us that the fear of vaccines is nonsense. Only people spewing pseudo-scientific crap about T2 overstimulation and other absurdity are telling us to fear vaccines. There's a reason that no actual science has ever implicated vaccines as a real health concern, and that's because it isn't.

Re: show butthoal

[sg_oneill]

What's this got to do with Liberals and Conservatives? Vaccine conspiracy nonsense is common across both Poles and instead tends to follow a pattern wjwre the centre is more pro vax and the heavily polarised folks more likely to harbor vaccine conspiracy theories.

Ie people that rant about liberals being the source of all woes, or conservstives being the source of all woes. Folks like you

No suprise...

[bblb]

This isn't at all surprising. We've conflated the ability to study text and memorize facts for the purposes of a degree with actual intelligence and applauded degree holding idiots for far too long. This is why every 20-something with a gender studies degree also believes they're an expert in politics, international trade, finance, science, etc. They go on youtube or some forum filled with like-minded individuals and find a litany of "facts" that are nothing but non-causal correlations, which they then proceed to repeat endlessly to anyone who'll listen as though they represent actual science; spreading ignorance on the basis of nothing but their own falsely inflated sense of intelligence and bolstered by the popular opinion that if they have some degree, any degree, they must actually be intelligent. Generations of students being taught to remember answers instead of how to discover them coming home to roost.

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

The anti-vaxxers have plenty of evidence because they have to in order to back their position.

What evidence would that be?

autism test

[BlackOverflow]

So the anti-vaccinators claim that vaccines cause autism. Well, now that we have several decades of the anti-vax movement, a simple test would be to see what rates of autism exist among them. That would either prove or disprove their claims. Of course, if it disproves them, some of them will still believe, but maybe some of them will leave the movement and others might not join.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

There's this thing called google, you may have heard of it? I'm not going to get into debate - clearly that's a pointless waste of time. If you're interested in trying to make an informed decision about vaccination rather than just swallow the coolaid then I wish you luck. The fact to hyperbole ratio on both sides of the debate is high.

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

Right, so you have no evidence, but are trying to look like you do. Thanks for being so up-front about that.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

Yeah you want me to do the research for you just so you can use your superior intellect and apply your bias without actually putting in any effort yourself. Thanks for being so up-front about that.

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

No, I want you to actually produce the evidence you claimed to have. You make the claim, you substantiate it.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

At no point in this conversation have I claimed to be anti-vaccination or have evidence. What steps have you taken to feel confident about your position on vaccination?

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

You posted:

The anti-vaxxers have plenty of evidence because they have to in order to back their position.

I'm asking you to share what this evidence is. My own views are irrelevant; maybe I'm pro-vaccine and curious to see what this evidence is. Maybe I'm anti-vaccine and hope to vet this evidence myself, and possibly use it when trying to sway others. It's immaterial.

The point here is that you pointed to external evidence, and are now unable to produce, or provide reference, to it.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

Why do you continue to suggest I'm in possession of evidence - that is not a claim I have made. The nature of the vaccination argument is that one side has expended some effort to try to make an informed decision and the other side just parrots the establishment.

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

Again, I'm not saying you're in possession of evidence. I'm saying you pointed to specific evidence that exists, and that you seem to have knowledge of, as you've positioned it as credible and reasonable. I'd like a reference to that evidence, so that I can read and evaluate it myself.

Re:I wonder

[pigwin32]

http://bfy.tw/M9UA

Re:I wonder

[SuiteSisterMary]

I'm very glad that you understand Google is a search engine. However, Google results aren't consistent between different users. Further, I have no way of knowing if whatever I find is the evidence you're referring to.