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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: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @02:38PM (3 children)
>When vaccination will return to be a basic form of emergency service like firefighting and police in proper republics, then we can discuss it without bias.
How is that supposed to work? By the time you're sick, vaccines don't do much if any good.
>"y'all need to get vaxxed else deadly mutations"
Ah, I see, you've been listening to idiots knocking down straw-man arguments like they matter.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 17 2020, @04:48PM (2 children)
How is police supposed to work? By the time you're attacked, police don't do much if any good.
> straw-man arguments
no I have been confronted with those argument and i replied exactly as I did in parent post.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @05:07PM (1 child)
Police reduce the number of criminals, and increase the risks associated with crime. They don't protect the individual, but they do protect society.
Viruses don't care about risk, and vaccines don't attack them directly. For bacterial diseases, antibiotics act like police, killing invaders alongside your immune system.
Vaccines though don't do jack against the disease themselves - instead they're an education for your immune system, so it can learn how to fight the disease before it encounters the real thing. If you don't know how to fight before the real battle begins, it's already to late for classes to help.
>no I have been confronted with those argument
Perhaps you have - plenty of idiots on all sides. There might have even been a real argument in there way back when, before idiots played telephone with it until it was mangled beyond relevance.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 17 2020, @08:13PM
What I meant is that police does also monitoring other than punishment. Monitoring helps prevention. Sure the virus doesn't care and the vaccine doesn't cure. The details of monitoring prevention and fight against viruses are irrelevant. Either you agree that such a fight should be done at state not private, for profit, level or you provide a reason why the current system is OK.
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