The American Osteopathic Association this week published the results of a survey of more than 2,000 adults showing that misinformation about vaccines is so pervasive in the US that more than half of respondents don’t recognize that vaccination entails risks.
Asked to identify anything that has caused them to doubt vaccine safety, 55% of respondents indicated that they have never encountered any reason to doubt vaccine safety.
Even more telling, when asked to choose from a set of statements about vaccines which one best represented their own viewpoint, 51% of respondents indicated their ignorance of the fact that these pharmaceutical products can potentially cause serious harm.
A small minority, just 2%, expressed their belief that vaccines generally are unsafe and ineffective. Another 6% expressed the more nuanced view that the risks of vaccinations generally outweigh the potential benefits. Only 9% expressed uncertainty about whether vaccines are generally safe and effective.
A large majority, 82%, expressed being in favor of vaccines, but only 31% of those acknowledged that there are risks associated with the use of these pharmaceutical products by answering, “I think the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks of vaccine side effects”.
The remainder — 51% — refused to acknowledge the fact that vaccination entails potential risk of harm by instead responding, “I think vaccines are safe and effective”.
This result, showing that most American adults are so misinformed about vaccines that they believe there are no risks to be weighed against the potential benefits, is an alarming testament to the pervasiveness of pro-vaccine propaganda in our society.
For an antidote, read my article “How to Immunize Yourself Against Vaccine Propaganda.”
I suspect that the 45% merely reflects the number of people who are willing to admit that they believe vaccines have risks. If you look at the uptake of the flu vaccine there are clearly plenty of people who are reluctant when it comes to some vaccines.
Either way, even the 45% proportion of people would be sufficient to have every vaccine pulled off the shelves except that people: a) are petrified of contagious diseases; and b) believe that vaccines can prevent said contagious diseases.
Non-vaxers have had plenty of success – despite the enormous propaganda lined up against us – in persuading people that vaccines kill and maim but have spent virtually no effort whatsoever in persuading people that: a) vaccines don’t work; and/or b) contagious disease is not something to fear.
You hate my approach because you think it is too extreme. But it is a principle based approach rather than a specifics based approach. I reject (consistently) the entire principle behind vaccination and fear of contagious diseases. So whilst at first, my approach is a harder sell, once I have sold it, the person never looks back. Using the standard approach of most non-vaxers I could easily persuade anybody that vaccines are more dangerous than we have led to believe. If I walked down the street and talked to 100 strangers about it, all 100 would go away thinking that vaccines had their dangers. However, all 100 would then visit their doctors and they would then get their (or their kids’) shots anyway because of the bullying.
On the other hand, tell someone that doctor offices are filled with sick people germs so if you are scared enough of such germs to vaccinate, you should be scared enough to avoid doctors then, at first, they will set your thoughts aside – it is just too big of a change in mindset to contemplate – but once they had heard it a few times from a few different people it would resonate so much that they would wonder how anybody in history could have possibly been gullible enough to get any vaccine.
As I say, there are more than enough people on our side when it comes to vaccine dangers. What we need is to focus on the fact that they don’t and can’t work. And the two best arguments for that are: a) doctors typically refuse to diagnose the condition if the patient is vaccinated; and b) doctor offices are filled with sick people germs – if germs were anywhere near as dangerous as we have been led to believe, then no doctor/nurse would be alive to vaccinate us against them.
I’d like to see the polling data. What or who did they actually survey?
I linked to the source.
Whom are you addressing? If you mean to address me with this statement, I have no idea where it’s coming from. I’ve objected to numerous of your comments on other threads not because I felt them “extreme”, but simply because your reasoning was fallacious. For example, here again you say:
But vaccines can “work”, i.e., stimulate a protective antibody titer, as with the measles vaccine. To deny this doesn’t do anything to further the cause of medical freedom and informed consent.
But you just wrote an article about Offit that admits that these antibodies aren’t actually “protective” at all.
The antibodies are just a response to being poisoned.
I can lay it out all for you and explain literally every one of your questions on this but you’ve made it clear you don’t want to hear anything that deviates too much from official dogma.
No I didn’t. On the contrary, what I wrote in that article is that “With measles, having a certain antibody titer does correlate with immunity…”
Please stop trolling the comments section of my site.