Most vaccine hesitant people use Facebook or YouTube to research which compounds the problem.

Being afraid of what you dont understand is instilled to us by our own evolution. We lived tens of thousands of years in a state where unfamiliar berry or strange animal could mean death.

But you are right. School system svould be better in explaining what vaccines do and how they work and society should be better shooting misinformation down.

Also instead of ridiculing the antivacciners people should try to be polite and try to help them understand what vaccines are. Being hostile or condesending just makes people to withdraw in to their own safe belives

I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.

A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.

But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic "don't let your kids eat jelly beans" or "do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain" hookum?

I think that's where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer's Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it's colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.

On the one end, there's supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.

America doesn’t just do this domestically.

They do. It's just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from "Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead" to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.

The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.

Can't let the wrong kind of people benefit

There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.

There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.

The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.

Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.

Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.

The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you've systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease's consequences fades through generations. People aren't afraid of Polio because they don't have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren't afraid of measles because they've never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.

The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.

This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake

Which is why we have decades of medical science that has gone to great lengths to discover these things. They can't be seen by the naked eye but they can be seen with a strong enough microscope. We know they exist and we know what they cause. We know how to prevent that from happening.

Yet these mouth breathing troglodytes have been conned into distrusting science on a fundamental level.

we've been begging for the shingles vaccine for years now. they won't even let us pay out-of-pocket. we're five years "too young" despite both my wife and i having already had shingles.

I get you are pissed, but shingles generally is not contagious (exept for people who havent had chickenpox), nor dangerous (for healthy people), so i get that its pretty low on the priority lists.

Alltough if its lasted that long i would be worried why. Getting shingles usually is telltale sign for weakened immunity system, or mark off high stress and both of those are bad things.

Women who have been through childbirth have certainly earned the right to be skeptical of doctors/ medicine. Women are still being mistreated and discounted in hospitals today, especially women of color. You have to get lucky to get nurses and doctors who treat your body as worthy of care, and you as worthy of belief and autonomy.

I remember the nurses just belittling me when I was like 10 and like I was scared of needles...

Something something "boys need to be brave" or something

never had to at the dentist and luckily the doctors said i need no more vaccines (unless we get another covid kinda deal or i travel to a country with foreign illnesses) so its not something i have to worry about for a while

thinking about it makes me feel a little light headed though, and normally i enjoy having phantom sense for stuff like asmr and vr but its also a curse when i think about needles and i can feel one in my arm where they do the vaccines. not fun