Now the question is will you allow your new born baby or grandchild to be vaccinated?! Of course you must! The vast majority of people do it happily and responsibly, and have been doing so since before we all were born. And thus we have for over a century ended terrible diseases that threatened our children and society!
When it comes to healthcare, misinformation can be deadly. We debunk the most common vaccine-related myths so you can protect yourself with confidence.
www.publichealth.org
Bandwagon fallacy isn't an argument.
Just sayin'.
I get that. But we live in a free society. When a child dies a few days after a vaccine we hear about it. Everywhere. When a new vaccine fails, we hear about it. When a new disease threatens we hear about it. Scientists study what happened. Politicians make promises of faster vaccine roll outs. Our public health and biological scientists do their best to educate and protect us.
So why
suddenly the hysteria? The truth is conspiracy thinking, doomsday predictions, obsessions about satanic forces taking over are hardwired into humanity. They have been with us for thousands of years. The U.S. has generated its own rich variety of new religions rooted in such fears. The “paranoid style” of American politics runs deep. But this new right populist
mainstream party partisan variety of the phenomenon is especially sick. It goes deeper than Trump, but he plays this game cynically, with a wink and a nod even to Q-Anon, and with his alliances with Christian fundamentalists.
Not that every Christian fundamentalist or Q-Anon supporter is evil. Most are very nice people in ordinary life. The guy who took his AR-15 into that pizza parlor to save the children in the non-existent basement from the Democratic Party bigwig pedophiles ... was a nice guy who later apologized.
Science does not offer full protection from Death and Disease. “Mother Nature“ can still bring us down and make us cry like babies. Our
own nature and superstitions can do that too. Pharma companies seek profits first. This is part of the nature of our economic institutions. Political witch-hunting and xenophobia can also destroy us.
A little Enlightenment is necessary. Skepticism yes. Madness and partisan extremism no. The “bandwagon” problem isn’t that we will listen to scientific advice, and all sides of any political fight, but that we will blind ourselves in our own certainty that we are pure and the “others” are evil ... and so work ourselves and society into a frenzy. Then we ride the bandwagon right over the cliff.