Dearest Anti-Vaxxers 3

I'm hoping this is my last go-round on the Anti-Vax thing, but I had to put this one up because there're points here that just sound really solid to me.

From The Skeptical OB (Dr Amy Tuteur):

We told them that it was only a matter of time before a childhood disease that had nearly been eliminated from the US would come roaring back if they failed to vaccinate their children. And that’s precisely what has happened. Measles has come roaring back, but not simply because a child incubating measles visited Disneyland.

Twenty years ago, if the same child had visited Disneyland, the measles would have stopped with him or her. Everyone else was protected — not because everyone was vaccinated — but because of herd immunity. When a high enough proportion of the population is vaccinated, the disease simply can’t spread because the odds of one unvaccinated person coming in contact with another are very low.

Of course, we told them that. We patiently explained herd immunity, debunked claims of an association between vaccines and autism, demolished accusations of “toxins” in vaccines, but they didn’t listen. Why? Because we thought the problem was that anti-vax parents didn’t understand science. That’s undoubtedly true, but the anti-vax movement is NOT about science and never was.

 Her contention is that these are the driving factors:

1. Privilege
2. Unreflective Defiance of Authority
3. The Need to Feel Empowered

Always looking for connections, I can take this:

First, it explains why efforts to educate anti-vax parents about the science of immunology has been such a spectacular failure. It is not, and has never been, about the science.

Put it together with this: 

We need to highlight the fact that unreflective defiance is just the flip side of unreflective acceptance. There’s nothing praiseworthy about it. Only teenagers think that refusing to do what authority figures recommend marks them as independent. Adults know that doing the exact opposite of what authority figures recommend is a sign of immaturity, not deliberation, and certainly not education.

And suddenly, a lot of the problems with certain parts of our body politic get a little easier to understand.  On just about any topic - Climate Change, ObamaCare, Public Schools, Poverty, Crime, Drugs - it's not about the facts; it's about how some people insist on believing they know as much about it as the people who actually know something about it, simply because they feel entitled to believe they know.

People are not just choosing to be ignorant; they're choosing to be mis-informed.  

They're making conscious decisions to be wrong.

We are so fucked.

(hat tip = FB friend VWE)