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Vaccine skeptics actually think differently than other people:
In 2000, the measles virus was declared eliminated from the United States. Despite cases coming in from outside the country, there were few outbreaks because most people were vaccinated against measles. And then 2019 happened.
The U.S. saw 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states -- the greatest number reported since 1992, with nearly three-fourths linked to recent outbreaks in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles.
After events like this, many people express confusion about others' hesitancy or unwillingness to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, a concept called vaccine skepticism. As vaccine skepticism has become increasingly widespread, two researchers in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences have suggested a possible explanation.
In an article published recently in the journal Vaccine, Mark LaCour and Tyler Davis suggest some people find vaccines risky because they overestimate the likelihood of negative events, particularly those that are rare.
The fact that these overestimations carry over through all kinds of negative events -- not just those related to vaccines -- suggests that people higher in vaccine skepticism actually may process information differently than people lower in vaccine skepticism, said Davis, an associate professor of experimental psychology and director of the Caprock FMRI Laboratory.
"We might have assumed that people who are high in vaccine skepticism would have overestimated the likelihood of negative vaccine-related events, but it is more surprising that this is true for negative, mortality-related events as a broader category," Davis said. "Here we saw an overestimation of rare events for things that don't have anything to do with vaccination. This suggests that there are basic cognitive or affective variables that influence vaccine skepticism."
[...] "Do some people encode scary stories -- for instance, hearing about a child that has a seizure after getting vaccinated -- more strongly than others and then consequently remember these anecdotes more easily?" he asked. "Do they instead have certain attitudes and search their memory harder for evidence to support this belief? Is it a bit of both? How can you counteract these processes?
"I'm excited that we're finding basic, cognitive factors that are linked with vaccine skepticism: It could end up being a way of reaching this diverse group."
Mark LaCour, Tyler Davis. Vaccine skepticism reflects basic cognitive differences in mortality-related event frequency estimation. Vaccine, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.02.052
(Score: 1, Troll) by stormreaver on Friday April 17 2020, @01:28PM (10 children)
Most of our modern vaccines were introduced in the 1960's, which is after all of the diseases they were created to treat had already faded to modern levels. Vaccines rode the wave of better nutrition and sanitation, then claimed responsibility for the results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @02:19PM
The Density is high in this one.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @04:34PM
> Vaccines rode the wave of better nutrition and sanitation, then claimed responsibility for the results.
The return of measles rode the wave of Goop. They did not take responsibility for the results.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday April 17 2020, @11:01PM (4 children)
You fool.
When Edward Jenner began vaccinating people with cow pox in 1796, small pox killed 20 - 30% of the people who contracted it.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:28AM (3 children)
Which, when you consider that it was the new vaccine at the time when vaccines were new, given the comparative risks of dying from the disease being vaccinated against, that's a pretty acceptable trade-off. That's the thing that a lot of people don't get - even if a tiny fraction of people were injured as a result of a vaccine, as long as that number is lower than what would be expected from the disease itself it would still be the better and more ethical thing to do. Even if you can't eliminate all suffering, you should still do what you can to reduce it.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:48AM (2 children)
Quite.
From what I understand, the anti-vaxxers talk a lot about "vaccine injury" but can't quite get their heads around the fact that when Andrew Wakefield came up with the "vaccine causes autism" trope he lied.
He also continues to lie about it and isn't a doctor anymore as a result.
Most anti-vaxxers are not arguing in good faith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @08:24AM (1 child)
Why do alot of recent (last 20 years) vaccines not have the accepted double blind studies to support them?
(Score: 2) by Kell on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:26PM
Vaccines do have clinical studies to support their effectiveness, but (contrary to popular perception) not all trials need be double blind. Firstly, we understand the principles behind which vaccines operate, especially for regularly recurring strain varieties, such as the flu. This is a matter of vaccine engineering rather than vaccine science. It would be a waste of scare resources to do randomised trials on something as mundanely understood as seasonal flu, whose variations are regularly recurring and to an extend predictable. Thus, the scientific proof standards for such vaccines are correspondingly lower; trials for many such vaccines are geared towards first proving the vaccine is safe, then secondly proving it is effective. As a matter of practical medical in the field, if it's safe and if it works, any additional placebo effect or positive cognitive bias on the part of the recipients is purely beneficial. Any negative effects will be quickly discovered through population infection statistics. As long as it works and helps more people than it hurts, great.
I am, myself, a robotics researcher with many highly-cited publications. You might be horrified to discover that we don't do double-blind trials in almost any of our work simply because what we do is exploratory engineering with clearly measurable outcomes. There is no risk of cognitive bias: it works or it doesn't. Similar case here. You most need double blind when the mechanism is unknown, where the outcome is highly uncertain, or where the effects are potentially ambiguous. This is partly why revolutionary new antibiotics and vaccines take forever, while something like a modified coronavirus vaccine could be pushed out the door relatively quickly. We already have trial vaccines we're confident will work; now we have to prove they are safe. But rest assured, when the first flu vaccines were still experimental science, such double blind trials were indeed carried out as part of their testing regimen.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:55AM (2 children)
There are several things to note. First, the decline in disease incident always follows widespread vaccination. There is no case where the infectious diseases dropped (often by two or three orders of magnitude) beforehand. Further, we can see this happening all the time in the developing world, parts of which are still adopting modern vaccination strategies, decades later.
And how, for a very glaring counterexample, does covid spread more rapidly in the US than in India, if nutrition and sanitation are so important?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @08:31AM (1 child)
In the US, many people have pretty poor health habits -- obesity, smoking, poor quality diet, etc.
I have seen no real look at health vs virus in this latest panedemic. How about vaping which
is popular only recently? We have all seen the person who will not quit smoking for any reason.
Should we get the tobacco companies and fast food companies to donate?
Oh yeah, the tobacco companies did a one time settlement years ago ....
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 18 2020, @11:41AM
Always an excuse, eh?
Certainly not in your post, eh?