All anti-vaccination rhetoric is conspiracy theory. Yes, you too.

Thanks for sharing, I’m glad you trust this is a safe place and will try to keep it that way.

Seeing this was a post not a book I didn’t do all the disclaimers but I’ll take the chance to reinforce them now – there are some people who should not vaccinate, there are genuine medical contra-indications, and there are some vaccine side effects. I for one will only respect your decision – I might in appropriate circumstances question out of curiosity, but not the decision itself. I’m sorry you’ve faced ignorance and hostility.

And I agree completely that they are as much a part of the pro-vax side. This is an enormous world wide conversation and the internet is changing the way we communicate, there are many things said and done by pro-vaxxers I disagree with and even cringe at. This is on both a personal and ‘tactical’ level – people having a conversation aren’t always thinking ‘is this the best way to get my message across’ even if there was agreement that there is a best way. That’s one of the reasons I keep bringing it up here (and every time I do I get lots of hits and lose followers) to do my bit in putting the message across in a different way and provide a resource for others. I know something like this post is going to upset a lot of anti-vaxxers – who wants to be called a conspiracy theorist! – but I’m not aimed at them. I’m aimed at the parents who are only hearing a little bit of the story that sounds reasonable.

I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to clarify, I was very careful when I said ‘anti-vax rhetoric.’ I’m not talking about individual decisions such as yours, but about the basis of the movement that is trying to convince parents not to vaccinate. For an individual there can be good medical reasons not to vaccinate, and the fact that you looked at the literature to find them actually proves the system is working – we have managed to identify risk factors, not cover them up. It is the suggestion that somehow all vaccines are dangerous for all people or at least a large proportion that must depend on a conspiracy to cover up all those reactions.

I will slightly disagree with you that the pro-vax movement is based on scare tactics and myths. Do people use them? Absolutely. But if the scare tactics and myths were taken away, there would be evidence that stood on its own – that is the medical literature. It might be semantics, but in this case I think semantics are important, because it is actually the point of difference between the two sides. If a new parent is trying to find their way and both sides are trying to scare them, how do they choose who to believe? What I am arguing here is that a pro-vax stance rests on a solid foundation of evidence and the support of people with many different loyalties. The anti-vax side rests on a conspiracy theory.

Option 2 itself isn’t conspiracy theory, however I think it is unlikely to the point of ridiculousness so I dismissed it. I should have made that clear.

“2. Vaccines are harmful and the researchers, regulators and health workers are too incompetent to see the dangers and disasters happening around them, but they can be detected by a simple check of the product insert when you have a vaccination appointment.”

There are two parts to it – Firstly that thousands of health workers, government officials and researchers all around the world for the last 200 years are all missing something.

And secondly that whatever they’ve missed is obvious enough that people who don’t know as much as they do about health and biology and don’t have access to the full statistics can somehow see it.

Absolutely researchers can and often do miss the big picture. But that is why there are checks and balances. Science is not decided on one interesting result but on entire bodies of literature, and there are literally hundreds of studies from all around the world and spanning decades that have been done on vaccine safety and efficacy. It defies belief that all of those studies, involving hundreds of thousands of subjects, have all been wrong. This is not one enthusiastic research group or one government or even one corrupt business – it is groups with intermeshing and even conflicting loyalties that still come up with the same answers. That adds enormously to the confidence.

As for the anti-vax movement somehow detecting this massive error, many of the people involved don’t understand basic maths or biology. The leaders of the Australian movement don’t understand the difference between absolute incidence and rates of infection or morbidity and mortality, if somebody has it wrong it’s not the medical and scientific establishment.

And thirdly we have another check on the scientific literature – internal consistency. When an oddball result appears, it is studied exhaustively. Look at cold fusion. And look at Wakefield and autism. The reason there are so many studies on this aspect of vaccines is because researchers, doctors and governments genuinely wanted to know the answer. They didn’t ignore parents or fob them off – they committed millions of dollars and research hours to it.

And those studies show that vaccines do not cause autism. They looked at different parts of the puzzle in different ways, but came out with answers that supported each other. If there were genuine mistakes happening then you would expect results that are all over the place, not consistent.

That is only one part of how exhaustively vaccines have been studied. To think that it’s all some sort of mistake because people didn’t want to see it stretches belief further than I think it can go. If nothing else, remember that many of those thousands of researchers, health workers and regulators are the parents and relatives of children with autism, auto-immune diseases, SIDS, and all the other ‘vaccine injuries’ that have nothing to back them up. They would have at least as strong a reason to look closely at those results as they do to support vaccines, and this is where it moves into conspiracy territory.