Re:How the Anti-Vaccine Community Is Responding to Covid-19
by CydeWeys on Friday April 17, 2020 @11:04AM
(#22899573)
For what it's worth, I'm 34 and had to get the MMR vaccine again last year because blood titers showed that I was no longer producing meaningful antibodies for rubella. Given that the average person has been vaccinated against over a dozen diseases, odds are good that at least one of them has worn off and needs to be re-upped by now.
So that's another reason the herd immunity is so important: If enough people opt out of just getting a simple shot, then now everyone else has to go through the much larger burden of periodic retesting and re-vaccining for them to be safe.
Source? Regardless, the large majority of aggregate cases of measles in the United States are among people who aren't vaccinated, which is a massive, massive over-representation and suggests that the measles vaccine is effective, regardless of specific anomalous cases.
I find this take of "being fair" to "nuanced" views quite common, but when I patiently let the whole anti-vax view be laid out, it is generally not particularly coherent nor well-sourced. I think stigma can be an effective way to change beliefs, because people can pretend they never held the belief in the first place. When you have someone lay out their whole argument, they often become more entrenched.
My source: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html