Have you seen what happens when antivaxxers are treated with respect, heard out, and their fears listened to?
I have.
But as long as you are donning the hat of Kalium-the-spokeperson-of-Science, you are displaying ignorance and comptept for human nature. You seem to confuse the fact that Science is able to get the material facts more or less right, with the assertation that people should automatically trust/obey what scientists say.
They did just that, during the 20th century... and then (some of) the scientist sold out to moneyed interests. They made claims that were not 100% supported by the facts, but they did it anyways because their sponsors asked for it very nicely. Then, when (some of) those claims turned out to be false... it was not the sponsors or the guilable individual scientists who received the hit to their reputations, Science-the-institution did.
So, people have reason to distrust. And the fact that you refuse to acknowledge that much and demand compliance because you happen to be donning a white labcoat makes all of us look bad.
You say that it is unfair that others only point to our mistakes and forget our successes. That's Standard-Operations-Procedure in politics, everybody does it. Heck, even you do the same, it is just that you don't notice.
So given that the other people are not going to listen to you... what's to do? Throw a tantrum? Or engage the others with the tools of the politician?
Anti-GMOers not eating GMO food doesn't hurt you, antivaxxers doing their thing does.
Their fear has not been without a human cost.
There may be people who would benefit from GMO food, but there aren't any food products that are available only as GMO versions. This makes it a political problem, not a "you can't have it if there is no GMO".
And equating anti-GMOers with anti-vaxxers isn't a solution to any problem nor reasonable.
GMO foods are capable of addressing specific problems, like vitamin deficiencies. People should be offered that choice. Anti-GMO activists, like anti-vaxxers, are hurting people by denying them helpful scientific advances.
Who here do you see arguing to ban GMO? Perhaps I just haven't looked closely enough.
What I have seen is people call for more testing, without defining what's enough for them to be confident in results. I've also seen people call for labels, but only on GMOs. I think the former is a backdoor ban. The latter should be applied to all foods.
Still no reason to equate anti-GMOers with anti-vaxxers.
It's antivaxers' children the ones that suffer the most, but as long as they remain a minority, the risks of an epidemic getting out of control is very small.
And no, we are not going to eliminate infectious disease any time soon. AFAIK, the only disease we have "eliminated" in recorded history is small pox; and what that means is that maybe a dozen governments have their stash of samples that they can turn in biological weapons... all while the rest of us slowly breed resistance out of the gene pool.
Plus since we can't just off the anti-vaxxers or let their sprogs die, society bears the cost of dealing with the messes they create.
You are factually wrong here. Science as we know it today is, what?, 150 years old? Are you really saying that all the achievements of human civilization up to ~1870 were plain dumb luck???? I don't know you, but, when I try to convince people of something, calling them idiots is generally a bad idea.
More over, your claim comes of as self serving and disengineous: "How dare you point out our mistakes, we have had plenty of successes too".
This attitude is eroding faith of the common people in science, and there's no one but the scientists to blame for that. The antivaxes might be all wrong, but I don't blame them for distrusting people that talks them down like that.