I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on everyone, which is very different than a medication that you choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are administered not for your own sake but to protect the community, and so again it's a different calculation where you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with chemicals) not because you think you need them but to potentially protect others should you become ill. Also there often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other than "the surgeon general said to".
So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem with medications in general.
If you're spreading lies about medicine because you distrust authority...
Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe falsehoods.
But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
Why would we have any patience for this?
Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more than any of that.
You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray. It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.
Well, if you don't trust the government, then the likelihood that you'll be willing to follow their "orders" is pretty low.
> But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
And __this__ response is exactly why people can become anti-vaxx without having a problem with medicine or science in general (which is the question being put forward by the OP). You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, and you're an idiot for not trusting the gov" (even though governments have shown themselves to be un-trustworthy many many times -- not in the area of vaccines necessarily -- but in other domains.
So this type of urging to "do it because we're all doing it because Uncle Sam said so" is highly counter productive.
What makes you think so? I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you.
Ironically, it's the person who believes the opposite of what some government says that is doing so.
of course, but you're missing the point being discussed here, which is "why are (some) people vaccine resistant but not resistant to medication in general?"; it becomes an issue when vaccines are _mandated_ (or quasi-mandated through heavy social pressure), because that's when the trust issue comes into play.
It's like when I was thirteen and suddenly thought my parent's interests were really uncool.
The reasons for why immunity to certain diseases is mandated is transparent and easy to understand.
Talk to someone with education in the field, like your doctor, rather than playing the edgelord.
In the abstract I can find the empathy in me to understand the childlike logic behind it, but like I said, zero patience for this bullshit.
So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate + preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical experimentation by the government.
A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat earthers.
This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.
Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?
If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.
That just means it's safer than being infested with untreated parasites.
It doesn't mean someone without worms should take it for funsies.
Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut, even if it would be very helpful for the pain.
Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/ instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe drug isn't generally safe.
If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.
https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-on...
> But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk. About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said, because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary course of use.”
> Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a little less than four times the maximum daily dose can cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for ibuprofen, because so few people have died from overdosing on that drug.
> From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.
> Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000 Americans to the emergency room annually and results in 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows. Acetaminophen is also the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes for Health.
> In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the agency’s larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy of older medicines.
> As the panel’s work was going on, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals weighed in on acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975 editorial that if the drug “were discovered today it would not be approved” by British regulators. “It would certainly never be freely available without prescription.”
except for the thousands of doctors who overprescribed opioids due to either ineptitude or their own benefit, or perhaps lack of alternatives
yeah, the Sacklers are primarily at fault, but I think people forget that they weren't handing out these pills themselves on street corners, but that __doctors__ were handing them out, triggering the biggest health crisis in America
Ivermectin is specifically listed in the "anthelminthics" section, i.e. for worms. It's an essential medicine because it's good at killing worms, which widely affect billions of people in developing nations.
It didn't win the Nobel prize and hasn't been used for decades to treat COVID-19.
Water is essential, too, but that doesn't mean a tsunami is good for you. Hydrating a sick person can save a life; waterboarding them can be a war crime. Context matters.
Sure, some of these might be the same people, but I disagree that there's a big overlap between anti-vaxxers, which are not uncommon (I know quite a few who "vaccine resistant" which in many people's minds == anti-vaxxers), and anti-5G which is very niche (I've never met or interacted with a single person who thinks that), or anti-EV which is again a different demographic ("I want to drive my gas guzzling F-150 because Amerika is #1")
If being pregnant was contagious, we'd treat it as a very different issue.
And what would the anti-vax position here be?
Childbirth used to be one of the key killers of women.
(Also, depends on the kids...)
> And what would the anti-vax position here be?
Our ancestors didn't get eaten by xenomorphs, you'll be fine!
-- Nobody suggested that only women get autonomy
-- Communicable diseases are obviously different than pregnancy in there health impacts on broader society
-- Lots of women in lots of places don't have bodily autonomy (there was a lot of discussion/reporting about it leading up to the recent US election)
I think a lot of the recent backlash was based on false claims by politicians and public health officials that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were necessary to protect others. But in reality the scientific evidence indicated that the vaccines had little or no benefit for reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. That discrepancy in messaging eroded public trust and made some people believe that authorities had ulterior motives.
There's no jurisdiction on the planet in which this is true. Certainly not the USA.
> let's not distort the discussion by inventing fake rights that appear nowhere in the US Constitution
The Constitution itself openly and clearly shoots down this idea in the Bill of Rights, in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
George Washington himself instituted a vaccine mandate. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolu...
https://www.ncsl.org/health/state-non-medical-exemptions-fro...
"All 50 states and Washington D.C. have laws requiring certain vaccines for students to attend school."
Employers, as a result, tend not to have their own requirements, for the same reasons they don't ask you to demonstrate you can count to ten if you have a high school diploma.
(And don't worry, they've got folks from other countries who might not have gone through our school system covered; https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...)
> Nobody asks me for my immunizations from the 1980s when I was in k-12.
Because you are virtually guaranteed to have had them. They will also not ask you if you're potty trained.
I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other "vitamins"
(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)
If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).
Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.
I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.
> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.
the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.
Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.
I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".
When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).
As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).
I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.
I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.
Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.
I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.
At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Of course, you should additionally read the various counter arguments that have been published, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5789217/, and likely more beyond.
I agree the needles don't help though.
RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."
===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===
===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===
===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===
[0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...
"appeared onscreen next to"
It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is nuanced, you have to go long form.
It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.
This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.
NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.
So I guess you can take your pick.
A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still stick with me and have basically made me intensely distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present before.
It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket, going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless totally unscientific bollocks.
It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.
Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of imprisonment.
- Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic inducing for a small number. Among street drug users, injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing only true addicts do.
- When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.
- Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there are good reasons for it.
- You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it should protect against, that's very noticeable.
- The most successful vaccines are now often considered useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare, why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is because of widespread vaccination.
Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.
Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.