

Best Shot – Protecting ourselves from the anti-vaccine movement - vkb
http://thewalrus.ca/best-shot/

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throwavaccine
I am struggling with the anti-vaccine movement right now.

My daughter - 18 months - has had her basic vaccinations, but is late for her
MMR due to my wife's concerns.

I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there's an
irrational "What about X" counterargument.

The fact that every rational explanation is greeted with another absurdity
reveals the sad truth: she -and the other anti-vaccine people I've met -
aren't interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines
are bad. We're based in Poland, and there's a huge amount of plausible-looking
anti-vaccine information out there.

Most unhelpfully, a child in our social circle recently had to be hospitalised
after a one-in-a-million allergic reaction to their MMR.

I'm close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I
can't idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God
knows what'll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother's back; I
don't hold out much hope.

Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully
convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I'm at my wit's end.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
I was in the same boat. My daughter is now 20. My decision, which might not
work as well now, was to hold fast for the ones I thought were vital (and I
apologize for not remembering which these were), to trust herd immmunization
for some of the others, make sure she was strong and healthy (lots of fresh
vegetables, jiu-jitsu, you know, eat well, exercise, plenty of sleep), and to
have a private talk with her on her 18th birthday or soon thereafter.

She is now pretty much caught up on her vaccinations.

I don't know if I would make the same decision now, given apparently lower
herd immunization rates, I might argue more vociferously.

It was easy to pick vaccines to reject, e.g., Gardasil (protects against only
2 of 4 major strains, covering ~%40 of cases, was not being given to boys, so
seemed like corporate welfare for sure and could give a false sense of
security), or the flu, which is useful for those at risk, less so for the
strong and healthy, and by conceding on one or two I was able to get some of
the more important ones.

Nowadays, now that I know the term catastrophic thinking, I might start the
conversation in a general and helpful way, talking not about vaccines at all,
but about how my wife reacts very strongly to bad news - or potential bad
news. Over time, talk about this as a couple. With luck, her reactions will
mitigate. If and when they do, discuss vaccination.

Good luck, my friend, it is a tough issue, an emotional one, and appeals to
facts are not your friends (because of the emotionality of the issue - the
underlying emotions must be acknowledged first).

~~~
protonfish
My wife didn't want to have her daughter vaccinated with Gardisil for this
reason either until she got cervical cancer. Since then she has changed her
mind. ~40% is still pretty significant.

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cecilpl
I think it's because the threat is not visible.

In the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc were
very common. Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were, and
vaccines were a clear way of solving this imminent and pressing issue.

I'm 30, and I've never had any of those. I've never even seen a case of
measles in anyone I know. I'm obviously still going to vaccinate my children,
but the benefit is not immediately obvious. They are very unlikely to get
measles no matter what I do.

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Throwaway1224
I got a lot of flak when pig SARS came around.

A few weeks after the news of an outbreak came around, a vaccine was available
in Finland.

I refused the vaccine under the premise that I didn't believe it had been
properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was "anti-vaccine" and
some kind of right wing wacko and that Bush was the devil, etc.

A couple years later, it turned out the vaccine gave a bunch of Finnish kids
narcolepsy, but by this point nobody was focused on pig SARS and my "See? I
told you so!" fell on deaf ears.

I think vaccine-hesitance is too readily labeled as anti-vaccine, and there is
a confirmation bias where it is easy to point out that someone is sick with an
XYZ infection but it is difficult to show correlation between a vaccination
that occurred 5 years ago and some symptoms that end up appearing as a result
of that vaccination.

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cpr
I know this is going to get massive downvotes, but it really comes down to
this decision:

Are you willing to potentially (under non-trivial odds) sacrifice your child's
health in some serious, potentially life-altering way, in order that the whole
community will be helped in some amorphous fashion?

Whether pro- or anti-vaccination, that's really the question.

You can put emphasis more heavily on the first or the second part as your
biases and experiences warrant, but that's still the question.

~~~
scott_s
No, it is not.

All medical interventions have a risk, vaccinations included. That is, there
is a risk that the intervention itself will cause some harm.

But all medical interventions also have a risk of _doing nothing_. It's when
the risk of the intervention is less than the risk of doing nothing that we
say it's best to do the intervention. As humans, we irrationally place greater
emphasis on risks from doing something over the risks from doing nothing. To
the point that some who read your point won't even notice the risk on the
other side. But this is irrational, and if we want to evaluate what courses of
action are _most likely_ to yield good health, we must always consider the
risk of doing nothing as well.

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EliRivers
_Like vaccination, homeopathic remedies work on the principle of like cures
like_

What's the emoticon for <fistbite>?

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phkahler
Aren't the vaccines supposed to protect us from the anti-vaccine movement? Oh
right, they don't always work so we need herd immunity. How about this:

Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look
like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.

Stop telling people the mercury really isn't a problem and just quit putting
it in there as a preservative. This OTOH is not hard. I'm not going to debate
weather the mercury passes through, just pointing out that we don't even need
to have the discussion. I know cost is supposed to be a factor, but when my
employer is having someone come to give flu shots "for free" I don't think the
cost difference is too much for a first world country. Eliminate the concern
rather than worry about convincing people.

~~~
throwavaccine
_Stop telling people the mercury really isn 't a problem and just quit putting
it in there as a preservative._

That's half the problem!

Mercury _hasn 't_ been in vaccines, and the confused compound hasn't been in
vaccines for at least a decade:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy)

~~~
phkahler
Thiomersal is a mercury compound. Mercury is know to be bad for you. The
research only tells us that the compound is out of the blood stream in X
hours, it does not tell us that all the mercury is gone - i.e. the compound
could break down and the mercury stored away. This is not certain, but given
there are alternative we may as well use them - that was my point and it has
nothing to do with autism.

