The anti vacination thing is a complicted problem that I think is downstream of both extremist liberal ideology (thatcherism etc.) as well as the profit motive in the pharmaceutical industry.
The primary driver of the mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry is that it is not trustworty. It's objective is not human health, but profit. Then you take the fact that, like most if not all aspects of medicine, vaccines have a potential for side effects, and potentially quite serious side effects. I think in the past there was probably a concious strategy to downplay the risks of vaccines in order to ensure that people were not scared to take them because the potential risks are not NEARLY equivalent to the harm that would be caused by constant epidemics of measles, polio etc. The problem is that strategy doesn't work anymore because of the combination of access to informaiton combined with social media's tendency amplify and distort this sort of thing. Radical Liberalism/anti communism has caused people to just be extrememly self centered, which means you can't go down the "be a hero, get vaccinated to save the community" route either. So basically when you end up with is a huge shit sandwhich and we are all going to have to take a bite.
What I mean to say is, anti vaxxers are a pretty predictable outcome of the way society is structured, and I don't think there is really a clear way out of it.
The anti vacination thing is a complicted problem that I think is downstream of both extremist liberal ideology (thatcherism etc.) as well as the profit motive in the pharmaceutical industry.
The primary driver of the mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry is that it is not trustworty. It's objective is not human health, but profit. Then you take the fact that, like most if not all aspects of medicine, vaccines have a potential for side effects, and potentially quite serious side effects. I think in the past there was probably a concious strategy to downplay the risks of vaccines in order to ensure that people were not scared to take them because the potential risks are not NEARLY equivalent to the harm that would be caused by constant epidemics of measles, polio etc. The problem is that strategy doesn't work anymore because of the combination of access to informaiton combined with social media's tendency amplify and distort this sort of thing. Radical Liberalism/anti communism has caused people to just be extrememly self centered, which means you can't go down the "be a hero, get vaccinated to save the community" route either. So basically when you end up with is a huge shit sandwhich and we are all going to have to take a bite.
What I mean to say is, anti vaxxers are a pretty predictable outcome of the way society is structured, and I don't think there is really a clear way out of it.