167 Anti-Vaxx

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Everyone wants control, and leveraging society's reverence towards children is a common method to grab it. Combine that with sanctimonious posturing & conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement explains itself. The attraction to pseudoscience is also easy to understand because people want to think they know special information that gives them an advantage, and true science is difficult with lots of people having superior knowledge. Pseudoscience evens the playing field by making it subjective thereby preempting expertise.</p> <p>There are many unsubstantiated claims as to why someone would deny their children the protection of vaccination but the most influential was the totally bogus connection of vaccinations & autism. The fact is, the charlatan doctor who provided the cover for that belief has been censured: not only was his research a complete fraud but he had a company that was supposed to offer an alternative to vaccines so discrediting them would have made him a rich man. He's not a doctor now, got his license stripped, and his paper was the only one ever to be removed from publication. There are seemingly more autistic children now because they live longer, we don't institutionalize them anymore, they are mixing more in the mainstream & society is simply narrowing its definition of what's "normal." The other specious claim, that vaccines aren't 100% safe is also baldly aggressive: the fact is almost all drugs are less "safe" than vaccinations.</p> <p>People claim that forced vaccinations violates their liberty and they are correct but medical treatment is one of the socialist capitulations that overrides liberty. Statistically, a certain percentage of people are required to be vaccinated for it to work for everybody. Unfortunately, some parents think their precious little Johnny is so special that they won't even take the trivial chance of vaccinations: let other less important children do it. The center-of-the-universe aspect of that position is its own mental illness.</p>