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I listed an example about the rotavirus in my subsequent comments, but here's another one mentioned by Patrick_devine in the comments: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/09...

This illustrates that the precautionary principle[1] might sometimes be forgotten or be put on the background.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle




That's a random fact, but not evidence in support of your thesis, which is that the currently accepted set of vaccines should be evaluated for their costs and benefits by individuals.

The evidence that individuals are better equipped and are less biased than the current scientific establishment to evaluate the costs and benefits of a particular vaccine is the evidence I'm looking for. The evidence that vaccine X was crappy is not. Evidence of people trying to get a new vaccine into the market or required for children is definitely not.


You ask for facts, I give an example of what I mean but then you reject it as random and needing evidence of a thesis I never formulated....

As for your second paragraph, the scientific establishment can be very wrong. Example: 20 years ago the scientific establishment rejected the idea of exoplanets. Today, there are hundreds catalogued. Although I had no facts to support my view, the consensus felt just wrong to me. I just think there might other be cases where the scientific consensus just feels wrong, a good reason to keep a critical mind!


"20 years ago the scientific establishment rejected the idea of exoplanets"

What?! No, they didn't. The Drake equation even had a term, f_p, for the fraction of those stars that have planets.

Drake's 1961 shot-in-the-dark estimate for f_p was 0.2-0.5 (one fifth to one half of all stars formed will have planets).

Sagan and Drake were believers in the principle of mediocrity, which says that "the Earth is a typical rocky planet in a typical planetary system, located in a non-exceptional region of a common barred-spiral galaxy." (Quote from Wikipedia.)

Others were believers in the Rare Earth hypothesis, yes, but there definitely wasn't the consensus rejection of the idea of exoplanets. The consensus was more that we don't have the information to stay one way or the other.

There are plenty of examples of when the scientific establishment was very wrong. Geologists didn't accept Wegener's theory of continental drift for many decades, and it wasn't until the 1980s that Warren and Marshall showed that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by H. pylori infection, instead of the then-consensus view that they were caused by stress or spicy food.




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