To Protect His Son, a Father Asks School to Bar Unvaccinated Children

No personal attacks on Hacker News, please.

Interesting that you picked abortion as an example. Those placards of gruesome images - do they change anyone's opinion? Or do they strengthen existing viewpoints? The people who are anti-abortion see the images and can't understand how anyone could want an abortion afterwards. People who are pro-choice see the placards and think the pro-life people are viciously anti-woman.

There is a group in the middle who might be swayed, but those people can be reached with calm language. In this analogy the placard-wielders are the "anti-vaxxers".

I guess I'm trying to say that mockery and ridicule are using emotion to try to change behaviours, but they create the wrong emotions and are counter-productive. We want people to feel welcomed, understood, supported, etc, while we're trying to change their mind.

There are broadly speaking three groups of people.

i) those who get vaccinations

ii) those who are unsure

iii) those who are anti vaccination

People sometimes assume that the people in group ii and in group iii and are deluded idiots who ignore all the evidence. Let's look at a real example of mass non-vaccination -- the MMR Autism hoax.

This involved a real but corrupt scientist who wrote a scientific paper but used faked data and published that paper in a respected medical journal, although they later withdrew it. That's not people believing in Unicorns! That's people thinking there's some scientific reason not to get that vaccination. Newspapers with their terrible reporting of science fed that fear. When the paper was retracted by the journal people don't know if that's because it's true but there's a technicality, or if it's false. At the point people were not aware of Andrew Wakefield's criminal corrupt behaviour.

Now try putting yourself in their position. Remember that Wakefield is still a scientist at that point; that although the paper is retracted you didn't know about the faked data. You have a bunch of your friends worried about whether they should get that vaccine or not, or whether they should get single vaccines instead of MMR. There are starting to be conflicting stories in the newspapers. And then, a group starts a website and members of that group start calling you a fucking idiot for even considering not vaccinating your child. They compare you to flat earthers and Yeti-watchers and alien abduction kooks. You know you're not like that, so already you've started to reject what they're saying. Some of your friends are sympathetic to you, reinforcing your doubts with phrases like "maybe there's nothing to it, but look at Bob - he was fine, he got the vaccine, and now he's Autistic" or "maybe there isn't anything to it but measles isn't that bad and do you really want to risk Autism" (and remember weak anecdotal evidence is rife on HN; and at least on HN user has suggested that measles isn't that serious).

I believe that mockery here pushes people away from information about vaccination and towards misinformation.

This example is tricky because of "hindsight bias". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

This is the best document about the crook Andrew Wakefield - http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

You might say that if you focus the mocking on group iii that people in group ii would want to avoid them. I think that people in group ii would feel themselves to be the target.

Also don't forget that people are not rational even when they claim to be. There are a bunch of areas where the science is very much clearer than in the early days of MMR (climate change) and you still have denialists who trot out arguments created by shills paid by a few large companies - the same shills that were used by the tobacco industry using the same tactics that delayed smoking controls for so long.

Then there is a set of people who can't get the vaccine for various reasons. The most obvious of these are very young infants, but it also includes elderly people who didn't get it when they were young as well as suffers of various diseases. Then there are people with depleted immune systems (chemo patients etc) who are vulnerable to diseases even if they are immunised.

It seems likely this set of people adds up to between 1% and 2%.

That drops it to 2-3%.

If 100 people die out of 10000 that are hospitalized, the danger of death from people who have an unusually bad infection is only 1%, meaning the risk for the general public is significantly less.

But I'll admit my grandparents lived in a time where they knew large numbers of people suffered through measles, mumps or reubela. If they had the same "I lived through it" attitude I have, those diseases would be much more common today.

But, still, I have a hard time telling my kids that they have to get this specific vaccine so they can avoid the horrors of spending a week or two covering themselves with calamine lotion, with a small risk of something worse happening.