A Most Productive Debate

[Koroviev]

"Why Parents Fear the Needle"
( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/opinion/21willrich.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp )

Some highlights:

But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield?s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology.

Such a move didn?t sit comfortably with many people, who saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion of their personal liberty. An antivaccine movement began to build and, though vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations ?a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.?

But the opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreated by the white medical profession, doubted the vaccinators? motives. Christian Scientists protested the laws as an assault on religious liberty. And workers feared, with good reason, that vaccines would inflame their arms and cost them several days? wages.

Health officials often get frustrated with public misconceptions about vaccines; at the turn of the last century, one frustrated Kentucky health officer pined for the arrival of ?the fool-killer? ? an outbreak of smallpox devastating enough to convince his skeptical rural constituency of the value of vaccination.

As smallpox raged across the American South, Wertenbaker journeyed to small communities and delivered speech after speech on vaccinations before swelling audiences of townsfolk, farmers and families. He listened and replied to people?s fears. He told them about the horrors of smallpox. He candidly presented the latest scientific information about the benefits and risks of vaccination. And he urged his audiences to protect themselves and one another by taking the vaccine. By the time he was done, many of his listeners were already rolling up their sleeves.

Bolded is the passage that discusses the "most productive debate" alluded to in the title of this thread. I find it very fascinating to read about a civil debate actually yielding palpable results. All too often people focus on trouncing their opponent, when it would be more to their benefit to recruit that person. After all, if, for example, one is concerned that the language of a law concerning gun control is too vague, then would it not be most productive to convince those who support the law that the language needs to be clarified, rather than simply trying to silence them or "win"?

Feel free to critique the article, discuss the vaccine controversy, or talk about debate in general. Oh, and read the article. It's good.

 

[Koroviev]

One notable difference between now and when Wertenbaker was able to convince those people is the Internet. Like the article said, people have so much false information to find there, I am unsure if just presenting the latest scientific information would be enough. Not to say that was being suggested, but it just seems like an unfortunate difference. There's a lot of bad research and the like to be discredited before it's easy to present people a fair choice. Though his approach is a rather good one. Being confrontational about it makes people see you as the enemy I think, which hurts your chances of convincing someone to listen to you.

This is very true. My college English professor informed my class that she had had a student who wrote a wonderful paper on immigration. There was one problem, however: all of the support for the paper's conclusions was drawn from a single website created by an anti-immigration group. Oops.

 

[NeuroticDogDad]

It's a very interesting topic. I am doing a module in History of Contemporary Medicine and we did a week on this type of thing.
It's ultimately a question of whether or not the general public can be trusted to make informed decisions on something they don't understand and if they can't, who can we trust to make the decision for us?
The first answer would obviously be doctors and we frequently do trust these people with our lives. However, with big cases such as Shipman, there has been a loss of trust in doctors, they've been shown to be what they are; human.
The general public has been shown not to be trusted with these decisions. The MMR scare was a massive embarrassment that demonstrated that certain groups of people will fall under the influence of the media and ultimately can't be trusted to critically digest the content of an argument being given to them.
Governments and policy makers are there to protect us from ourselves. It isn't a question of personal liberty because by not getting vaccinated you're putting other people at risk and it is the job of governments to protect the public from those who would endanger them. If enough people aren't vaccinated then a threshold is crossed where we have outbreaks and people lose lives.
In my opinion we have to have a system in place whereby somebody makes medicinal decisions for us and the most qualified and readily available people to do it are doctors. They are trained to make these decisions and whatever the average person may be able to find on the internet doesn't cut it.

 

[Gilhelmi]

I kind of understand all sides to this.

On the medical side - vaccines are proven to prevent or lessen outbreaks.

On my Chiropractor view - vaccines are poisons injected into children bodies. and suggested more natural methods like breast feeding (antibodies are passed from mother to child).

Some religions view - all western medicine is bad how dare you trample on my freedom of religion by making me vaccinate.

My view - I would like to wait until my children are ready to start preschool or later. Every other child will be vaccinated so there is virtually no chance for mine to get infected. But I still sort-of trust doctors and the government so I will do what it says.