I was just reading about the link between anti-vaxxers and conservatives in the U.S.:
"So how did this happen? Part of it is ideology. Republicans don’t like government forcing people to do stuff, and requiring children to be vaccinated in order to attend public school runs afoul of that libertarian impulse. (Notably, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first nationally known Republicans to propose making vaccination non-mandatory.)
Part of it is the magnifying effect of social media, which flattens the difference between truth and lies.
Part of it, as a Daily Beast study showed in 2016, is Donald Trump personally. More than any other politician, Trump normalized anti-vaxx mythology, expressing doubts about the efficacy of vaccines and concerns about their (non-existent) link to autism. As measured in July, 2016, 23 percent of the respondents who said they would vote Trump said they were unlikely to get vaccinated. Of the pro-Clinton respondents, 13.5 percent felt the same way.
And part of it, surely, is the anti-science bias of the current administration. Sure, not a single peer-reviewed study has linked vaccination to autism. Sure, the entire myth, as is now known, derives from a single, wholly debunked bit of pseudoscience by Andrew Wakefield—a report discredited, withdrawn, refuted, and disavowed."
I also wonder how many people think that their decision to not vaccinate their own kids won't harm the general public. They are seriously unschooled (read: completely fucking ignorant) on herd immunity.
"So how did this happen? Part of it is ideology. Republicans don’t like government forcing people to do stuff, and requiring children to be vaccinated in order to attend public school runs afoul of that libertarian impulse. (Notably, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first nationally known Republicans to propose making vaccination non-mandatory.)
Part of it is the magnifying effect of social media, which flattens the difference between truth and lies.
Part of it, as a Daily Beast study showed in 2016, is Donald Trump personally. More than any other politician, Trump normalized anti-vaxx mythology, expressing doubts about the efficacy of vaccines and concerns about their (non-existent) link to autism. As measured in July, 2016, 23 percent of the respondents who said they would vote Trump said they were unlikely to get vaccinated. Of the pro-Clinton respondents, 13.5 percent felt the same way.
And part of it, surely, is the anti-science bias of the current administration. Sure, not a single peer-reviewed study has linked vaccination to autism. Sure, the entire myth, as is now known, derives from a single, wholly debunked bit of pseudoscience by Andrew Wakefield—a report discredited, withdrawn, refuted, and disavowed."
I also wonder how many people think that their decision to not vaccinate their own kids won't harm the general public. They are seriously unschooled (read: completely fucking ignorant) on herd immunity.
Illegitimi non carborundum
