You can’t be too careful
Oh, so this is where ‘respect’ for ‘beliefs’ gets you.
While many parents meet deep resistance and even hostility from pediatricians when they choose to delay, space or reject vaccines, they are often able to find doctors who support their choice…“I don’t think it is such a critical public health issue that we should force parents into it,” Dr. Sears said. “I don’t lecture the parents or try to change their mind; if they flat out tell me they understand the risks I feel that I should be very respectful of their decision.”
Why? Why does Dr Sears feel he should be very respectful of parents’ stupid, misinformed, dangerous to their child and other children decision? What exactly is it about a decision of that kind that Dr Sears feels he should respect? Its selfishness? Its irresponsibility? Its lack of evidence? Its ignorance? Its cluelessness? What is there to respect? If the parents told him they let their child rollerskate on the freeway, would he respect that? Why respect a decision not to vaccinate?
In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected…Every state allows medical exemptions, and most permit exemptions based on religious practices. But an increasing number of the vaccine skeptics belong to a different group — those who object to the inoculations because of their personal beliefs, often related to an unproven notion that vaccines are linked to autism and other disorders.
‘Personal beliefs’ that are not religious beliefs (which I don’t think should be ‘respected’ on medical issues anyway) but just plain old beliefs, and wrong ones at that. That’s a stupid reason for an exemption.
“The very success of immunizations has turned out to be an Achilles’ heel,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”
They ignore the real risk and fret about the bogus one. And Dr Sears feels he should be very respectful of that. Whatever.
Thanks for posting this OB. This is one of my major anger triggers – smug, comfortable upper middle class parents who believe all manner of nonsense about “natural health” and put their children and society at risk on the basis of a warped (and really “religiously” fervent) misunderstanding of statistics and science.
There’s a lot of pure lunacy in the readers’ comments section on the Times page. Don’t bother, you know what they’re saying already. I’ve sacrificed my blood pressure so that yours might be saved. But here’s an excerpt from one comment you’ll like:
“I’ve seen preventable infections kill or permanently disable children and infants. I don’t think I could live with my self as a parent or doctor if I didn’t do everything for my children to protect them from harm. We, as Pediatricians, get ANGRY at parents who inadvertently harm their children. Not vaccinating your child is like not using a car-seat in the car. It is putting your child in harms way.”
– Pediatrician, Walnut Creek, CA
I’m working on a diagnosis for this syndrome you’ve described, doctor. Smug, comfortable, upper-middle-class parents are familiar to me, at least by proxy, since the symptoms you describe are passed on to their undergraduate children. I believe the root of all these symptoms is a psychological malady commonly referred to as “sense of entitlement.”
Many researchers think that a sense of entitlement is fully characterized by the sufferers’ persistent belief that their unearned superior position in society simply belongs to them by something resembling divine right, that they somehow deserve it (without in fact having done anything whatsoever to earn it). Evidence shows, I think, that the problem runs deeper than that. Many of those most profoundly infected by a sense of entitlement not only feel entitled to their wealth, social position, lack of any serious obstacles to achieving whatever they want in life, and similar socio-cultural phenomena, they also feel entitled to their own facts. Not, mind you, their own beliefs, but their own facts. That is, they believe that the universe must conform to their beliefs not because their beliefs are supported by carefully gathered and evaluated evidence, but simply because they believe thus and such is the case. They might be vaguely cognizant of the notion that beliefs are the sort of things about which people can be mistaken, but they are quite convinced that they never have to worry about that being the case for themselves.
Nor should this surprise us. Firstly, it follows a common pattern. After all, those with the most strongly developed sense of entitlement are usually vaguely cognizant that other people suffer life obstacles such as prejudice and oppression, persistent long-term poverty, inadequate or no education, and so on and so forth. But as the privileged do not in fact have to worry about suffering such things themselves, they have no motivation to think much about them. And if they do think about them at all, they blithely assume (without reflection or evidence) that such obstacles are easily conquered: After all, all of the “obstacles” they face in life are easily conquered. It’s easy to see how this pattern would play out with respect to beliefs: “Sure, ‘people’ can be mistaken – but I’m not.”
Secondly, a key characteristic of a strong sense of entitlement is an overblown sense of one’s own worth and achievements. Those who vastly overestimates their own worth and achievements are unlikely to limit that overestimation to just one area of life, and so a sense of entitlement quite naturally extends from the socioeconomic realm into epistemology.
The problem with my hypothesis, I feel compelled to point out, is that the oppressed and disenfranchised also very frequently feel entitled to their own facts…
[Apologies if this seems over the top to anyone. I appear to have had an extra helping of Snarky-O’s at breakfast this morning.]
Of course the doctor should respect the parents decision not to vacinate their children, what is the alternative doctors badger bully and berate parents untill they agree?
G. not only feel entitled to their wealth? Who would you sugest would be entitled to their wealth? the goverment? or maybe Africa? the guy next door perhaps?
“Never underestimate the powe of human stupidity”
– sorry, I can’t remember who said that – was it R. A. H. ??
But surely Richard you can see that it is at least possible to argue that not all people are entitled to what they have? I mean, libertarianism is a fun game, but objective reality indicates that much wealth is come by through dishonesty, double-dealing, outright fraud, nepotism, manipulation of unfair rules by interested parties, etc etc.
And as for those who inherit their wealth, they may be legally ‘entitled’ to it, but what is at stake here is the sense of entitlement to the opportunities money provides – or in other words, the assumption of the right to believe that one is actually better than someone else [and thus, as G is saying, *knows* better than someone else] just because one has more money – even when one did not actually *do* anything to acquire that money.
Yes Dave but who makes the value judgement about who is entitled and who isnt a lot of people think plumbers are overpaid so would I be in the firing line or would I be exempt because of my blue collar status? and anyway poor people tend to be poor because they make poor life decisions not because rich people have to much,I know that is not the case across the board but I still think this is a dangerous game to play!
Also I think a lot of my customers would be described as rich and they quite often will spend that money on new expensive bathrooms and that in turn pays my bills,another thing I notice about these rich types I work for is that they tend to work long hours.Although I would agree that some wealth is come by dishonestly I would bet that most comes from hard work and good decision making!
I think you are missing the point. No one suggested simply inverting the pyramid of wealth-distribution just for the sake of it. Indeed no one mentioned redistribution of assets at all. The discussion is about whether a combination of factors, including wealth however obtained, creates an objectively false sense of ‘entitlement’ to reshape reality in individuals’ favour.
On this point: “poor people tend to be poor because they make poor life decisions”, I would point out that the worst ‘life decision’ most ‘poor people’ make is to be born to the wrong parents, in the wrong country [not to mention the terrible error of being born the wrong sex]. If most of the rich people in the world had been born the daughters of Congolese peasants, they wouldn’t be where they are. It isn’t a level playing field.
I’d further point out that this unfair game makes your ‘life decisions’ point irrelevant – all the choices in the world can’t make everyone rich, in a system which runs on ensuring that resources are concentrated in the hands of the ‘best’ players of the inherently unfair game. It doesn’t matter how ‘good’ you are if 500 million of you are equally ‘good’. The 1 million who are ‘better’ will get more [and indeed, most]. The ‘poor’ decisions of the majority don’t have to be ‘objectively’ poor, badly judged, foolish, they just have to be less good than the winners, and that’s them stuffed. ‘Trickle down’ economics, which so many pundits would raise in response to such a point, is not a moral response. It may be reality, but I don’t see why anyone has to like it.
As you say Dave it is reality and it seems to work,also nothing we can do in the first world can realy have much impact on what happens in the third world because a lot of the problems are all but imposible to solve, you seem to think that their plight is our fault? just because we are sucesfull does not mean that it comes at the expense of their misery.
No one can help where they are born but I was talking about decisions like people having children that they cant afford that can be changed.
That is what is known technically as ‘having your cake and eating it too’. You are attempting to qualify out of existence your own generalisation, and replace it with another one. However, since the other one is equally tendentious, the strategy will not work. I am very glad, at an interpersonal level, that you are so happy at the way the world has worked out, it must be a great comfort to you. But let me assure you that there are many people, some of whom have won Nobel prizes, who are less certain that things are the way they are because that’s just the way things have to be.
Dave just because some Nobel prize winners think that marxism could work dosnt seem a very stong argument, it has been tried and has failed in the most spectacular way in every part of the world! what you seem to be saying is that capatilism is only o.k as long as you wring your hands about the un fairness of it?that just seems like pointless white guilt to me.
Richard, at the risk of explaining someone else’s point (and maybe missing it myself) I suspect that you are using the term ‘sense of entitlement’ in a slightly different way to G.
Yes, you are of course entitled to the money you earn, win or inherit. As long as you pay tax.
My understanding of G’s point is that among the privileged and fortunate middle classes (of which I am one, I guess) there exists a large and annoying sub-group who feel that their access to the best goods and services is not so much good fortune as evidence that the universe is working as it should.
For this group it follows that whatever confirms their enjoyment of privilege is right and proper and whatever challenges it is wicked and to be disregarded. Facts must adjust themselves to meet their expectations of continued specialness.
‘…it is reality and it seems to work,’
Does it? A reality which consists of a few islands of peaceful, prosperous life on a planet overwhelmingly under the hooves by the four horsemen is working? Where even in the UK around one third of children are defined as being in poverty?
It has always struck me as working pretty damn badly.
“The 1 million who are ‘better’ will get more [and indeed, most].”
A relevant, and very interesting, read here is The Winner-take-all Society by Robert Frank and Philip Cook. In a lot of enterprises (sport, entertainment, technology, etc) tiny differences can mean huge success for one or a few and complete failure for everyone else. A lot of enterprises are not a continuum but success or nothing. This is one thing that makes the feeling of entitlement especially wrongheaded, because so much wealth is not a matter of hard work or talent but of luck and circumstances. Fashion, for instance, plays a huge role. What’s that got to do with hard work or talent? Nothing.
Don that still just seems like white middle class guilt to me, of course the world is a better place if you have a bit of cash,I am not unaware that I am one of a priveledged few but I just refuse to feel guilt over it,I come home every evening looking like something the cat dragged in aching from head to toe, so even if I am fortunate in comparison to most of the world I fail to see what I can do to change it, other than donate to n.g.o.s like oxfam,sight savers ect. at the end of the day nothing will change the fact that my cat lives better than 2 thirds of the worlds people.
Richard, thinking about things is not the same thing as ‘white guilt.’ Who said you were supposed to ‘change it’? And how on earth do you know that nothing will change the fact that your cat lives better than 2/3 of the world’s people? You don’t know that. You don’t know that things won’t improve for some or all of the 2/3, and you don’t know that things won’t deteriorate for you and your cat.
The first necessity for sensible conversation is to know what we don’t know. The second is to reply to what people actually say rather than to a translation of what they say.
Richard, I still think you’re missing the original point. “Sense of entitlement” isn’t so much about economic success, but about the notion that someone is entitled to be right. It’s the college student who argues with the professor’s corrections on her essay, saying “Well, that’s just your opinion.” It’s the parent who is outraged because little Billy wasn’t accepted into Prestigious University, never mind that he hasn’t gotten a better grade than ‘C’ in the last three years. Having economic insulation allows some people to convince themselves that the world really does revolve around them.
Yes, well what Karen says indicates why it’s useful to reply to what people actually say rather than to a translation of what they say – that helps to avoid missing the point. Or to put it another way, they’re the same thing.
That’s why the discussion on the ‘spirituality’ thread went so wrong the other day: there was so much point-missing going on.
Richard,
White? Yeah. Middle class? Yeah. Guilt? No, don’t feel any of that. Just aware that a system that has arbitrarily alloted me a comparatively cushy billet is not, on the strength of that, necessarily a good system.
Also, what Karen said.
The most important “privilege” these anti-vaxer parents enjoy is to have grown up in a world where the childhood diseases are not a fact of life. And by and large, it is their own crippling ignorance of how lucky they are to live in a time and a place where they have never had to fear disease that causes them to behave in the incredibly wrongheaded way they do. It has nothing to do with being white or middle-class, and everything to do with ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills.
Richard, let me define this “sense of entitlement” thing more straightforwardly, since you seem to have missed the point entirely.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being lucky. No one has to defend themselves for being born into good circumstances, or being sent to good schools, or being adequately nourished as a child. But if you think you DESERVE the results of your good fortune, you’re kind of a twit. Neither good luck nor bad luck come only to the deserving: That’s why we call it “luck.”
And if you not only think that you deserve your good luck, but further think that everyone who isn’t as lucky as you deserves their bad fortune – even though their bad luck is often no more the result of their choices and efforts than your good luck is (unless you somehow think that being born into the middle or upper class is a child’s choice) – then you’re not just a twit, you’re an asshole.
But what makes such a person an asshole instead of merely mistaken or wrong-headed? A sense of entitlement is rooted in the all-too-common conviction that resources and opportunities which are unevenly distributed to a HUGE degree are simply not relevant to success in life. If someone is blind to the advantages they are born with (and equally if not more blind to the disadvantages others are born with), they tend to have an overdeveloped sense of their own achievements and importance, which leads them to (1) denigrate or simply ignore the basic human worth of those less fortunate, and (2) be extraordinarily presumptuous, arrogant, and judgmental in general.
While no one is wrong for being fortunate, willful ignorance of fortune and misfortune – of life’s real and obvious inequities – certainly is blameworthy. The blindness of privilege is almost always a very willful and deliberate sort of “I’m not looking, I’m not listening,” self-blinding, a form of ignorance that must be actively maintained against massive bodies of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. That’s why I referred to the idea that uneven distribution of resources and opportunities has no bearing on life success as a “conviction” rather than a mere belief: It’s not a conclusion, it’s an article of faith.
And that is what having a sense of entitlement is ultimately about: A sense of entitlement consists in absolute faith in the essential rightness of your superior place in the world, and that almost always and quite naturally extends to absolute faith about your own rightness in general – which includes faith that your beliefs are true in the absence of any real justification, or in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. A sense of entitlement is the root cause of all sorts of assholery, such as deciding you know more about the quality of your paper than the degreed professional who is teaching your class and assigned the paper. (Thanks, Karen, that’s just the sort of thing I had in mind!) Or deciding that your law or finance degree (or your real estate license, or whatever else earned you your house in the ‘burbs) makes you better qualified to judge the costs and benefits of vaccination for your child than the entire medical profession.
PS: I wrote the above in second person, intending it in the generic “you, whoever you are” sense rather than addressed to “you, Richard.” But on second thought, it can be read equally well both ways. Such a sense of entitlement does seem to go hand in hand with conservative/libertarian politics, and spouting this ludicrous “poor people make poor choices and that’s why they’re poor” rhetoric does illustrate my point rather perfectly.
This is off topic, but:
“As I have grown older, one thing that has struck me more and more, is that no one, or practically no one, is talking about population any more.”
In general, this is because the Malthusian catastrophe pushers have been wrong every time so far, and it turns out that the best way to “control the population” is to encourage greater political and social freedoms rather than to treat the people as a herd of cattle that need to be culled.
dzd: Well, yes, ignorance and a lack of critical thinking are of course important in this discussion. But as Dr. Josh pointed out at the top of this thread, the sort of parents who seem to be most responsible for avoiding vaccination are in fact the comfortable, upper-middle-class types. Admittedly his evidence is anecdotal, but that’s also the impression I’ve gotten from absolutely everything else I’ve read about this anti-vacc movement.
I don’t think educated, upper-middle-class people are most notable for their ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills. Indeed, they are typically much better educated than average citizens – and there’s no prima facie reason to think they are, as a group, less able to think critically than the rest of the populace. So the fact that they are more willing than most other groups to ignore the advice of the entire medical profession on the health and welfare of their own children (and everyone else’s children) still seems to stand in need of some explanation. I think that an overdeveloped sense of entitlement is a plausible explanation.
In other words: Yes, of course anti-vaccination results from lack of critical thinking. But *why* are these people incapable of or unwilling to think critically? The willful blindness and supreme arrogance of privilege seems to fit the bill.
Have Matlhusian catastropye pushers been wrong every time so far? I don’t know. I seem to remember famines, poverty, scavanging, child slavery, abuse of women…. Need I go on? What does it take to show that Malthus was right? When does population become a problem? Are GM crops always going to be there to solve the next human catastrophe? Isn’t there one now? And, as I said, this was an aside, though it seemed to have moved to the centre.
G
I’d suggest that in the UK at least the kind of people you describe tend to read the Guardian and watch Channel 4, both of which were egregiously biased about the MMR issue when it first developed.
Ophelia
As the article was US-based are there similar markers over there?
There are plenty of people who still think ‘population’ is a problem. [By which I don’t necessarily associate myself with them. NPOV and all that…]
But in general public discussions it has rather been replaced by the broader category of environmental degradation and resource-exhaustion, ‘peak oil’ and all that, with on its reverse face various ‘miracle cures’ ranging from tar sands to bioethanol.
A cynic might suggest that rich white people have just decided that Africa is f*cked come what may, and that India and China, being now economic competitors, can sort out their own problems [with the menacing tone that phrasing implies…]
Chris, NPR is probably the closest, but I mostly don’t listen to it any more so I don’t know what its MMR coverage was like. NPR does have a good science show (of which I did listen to a piece yesterday), Science Friday, which mostly does reject bullshit and say what’s wrong with it and so on.
Well, hey! What do you know. I’m a cynic. At some point in the last thirty years everyone stopped talking about population. First there was the
‘population bomb’ and then, suddenly,nothing. Nothing at all. It’s okay. Have as many kids as you like The world can stand it. Don’t ask me why. Political correctnesss. Politeness. Funk. I have no idea. But suddenly, without warning, everyone’s talking diaster and not talking about population. I guess I skipped a beat somewhere. So, I’m a cynic. Is there anything you have to say, even to a cynic?
Eric,
Relax, we’ll get to you. It’s the holidays.
“First there was the
‘population bomb’ and then, suddenly,nothing. Nothing at all.”
Paul Ehrlich turned out to be laughably wrong and then we discovered that famines are usually caused by kleptocracies who fancy guns over butter.
There are always kleptocracies. The question is what people do when the kleps are stealing all their food. Or did you think, like Leibniz, it’s really the best ….. etc.
Look G. and everyone else I got G.s point the first time, I was commenting on the marxist type wealth envy rhetoric he employed to make that point. To answer G.s original point about upper middle class people not automaticly delivering up their children to be vacinated on the say so of experts because they are upper middle class entiled snobby types who refuse to listen to their betters,let me just say this I run into these types all the time in my job and they are to a person well educated well imformed on isues like take up rates and measles outbreaks they do not take the decision not to vacinate thier children lightly,and nor should they try opening a 100 year old medical book and read what the entire medical profesion thought back then what makes todays experts any more infalable? On the subject of being born into privelidge I grew up in a comfortable middle class home but only because my parents slaved to make that so my late father was born into grinding third world like poverty in a small Welsh mining village he studied for university by the light of an oil lamp because their gas had been cut off, my mother lived in London throughout the entire war a half mile away from a primary target(Clapham junction)so where is the luck I just dont see it? As to my cat O.B I do know things will get worse for him he is 22 years old sick and very cranky but you are right I dont know what the future holds for the third world I am just going by what i have observed in the past.
As for this alocation of recources argument I dont buy it the Arab world has 250 million people half the worlds oil yet they have a conbined g.n.p less than spain a nation of 60 million people not long free from Fraco,s jack boot.
Eric the reason you dont here much about population control is because the cure has been worse than the disease the chinese have been down this road they now have 1 million spare men, any guess what a million men make? a frustrated army,I am with d.z.d on this one.
not only feel entitled to their wealth or uneven distribution of resources and opportunities. or the results of your good fortune. and finaly vastly better fortune than I not to recognize or acknowledge their own good luck.
G. these phrases I just lifted from your posts you basicly imply that success comes from either luck,good fortune or uneven distribution of recources,the reason I refer to it as marxist is that it seems no different to what I would read in a S.W.P. news letter, It strikes me that far from being lucky you have worked hard and long hours(Looking at the time you make some of your posts I would guess that you are up late many nights writing your disertation) and probably i expect you choose to spend your money on your education rather than the latest wide screen t.v cell phone,car ect? any rewards that you recieve will be because you and you alone have earned them, even being white hasnt helped you if you had been black or hispanic you would have qualified for afirmative action but instead you had to work side jobs to pay your way, so again where is the luck? on the subject of vacination you seem to ignore the very real fact that vacination can cause serious harm to a small amount of children you also dismiss the very real fears that well educated well imformed parents have over this isue,remember parents are not making the decision about their own treatment they are making decisions for a helpless child that has no say in the matter. It is a parents duty to look after their own childs well being not societies so if they live in an area that has a high take up rate for vacination and there are no nearby outbreaks of measles ect I dont see a problem with parents not vacinating their children.
“It is a parents duty to look after their own childs well being not societies so if they live in an area that has a high take up rate for vacination and there are no nearby outbreaks of measles ect I dont see a problem with parents not vacinating their children. “
So what happens when enough stupid parents apply this logic and a full-blown disease outbreak erupts?
It is important to note, at this juncture, that the “very small number” of children who have adverse reactions to vaccines is many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people who have been suffered permanent injury or outright killed over the centuries due to the kinds of diseases now on the brink of eradication. Failing to vaccinate therefore opens not only “society”, but their own children, to immensely greater risk.
Anybody not capable of grasping this should probably not be a parent in the first place, but alas…
I know I’ve explained this before, too. It’s basic epidemiology, but for some reason Richard still insists on seeing this as some kind of loony-libertarian “GOV’T NEEDLE MEN STAY AWAY” issue. Being an anti-vax parent is harmless when you’re the only one. When you are part of a strong and growing international movement, it is almost guaranteed to be more dangerous for your child than any possible side effects.
@Richard: “you would have qualified for afirmative action but instead you had to work side jobs to pay your way”
I’m sorry, I’m trying to be nice, but this comment, like so many others of yours, just proves that you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
A side note on style and mechanics –
It’s much easier to read and understand a comment here if the writer uses conventions like punctuation and paragraph structure. When the text is but one long stream of words with no capitals, few commas, and no white space, it’s very, very hard to read it. Please don’t make your readers work so hard to understand you; some of them will skip right over it when you ask them to do the work you should have put into your own post.
You know, Richard, I did ask you to do that a few months ago – that’s why I told you how to copy and paste. You can just use Word, it will do the corrections for you. My point was the same as Josh’s: you make us work too hard to read your comments.
And you should read more carefully. G. said hard work is part of the story, so there’s no point in your telling him that hard work is part of the story.
G.All that you just wrote is a given, I have already said that I was well aware that I am one of a privelidged few, of course life is easier for me than some black kid in the south Bronx,the point I am making it that a lot of the commenters here seem to feel the need to beat up on themselves over it. To use you as an example you from what I read have caught about half the breaks I had, yet you still cant take full ownership of your own hard work.
d.z.d the reason I treat it that way is because the goverment run the vacination program, as for anti vacs becoming a movement, if they did become a large group I would guess that a lot of people would re think their position in the light of new facts.
Another, admittedly anecdotal, foray into the entitlement argument…
Yesterday I chatted on the phone with some friends who I met through my late parents. They’re really sweet, amazingly hardworking people, emigrants from Mexico who are now U.S. citizens. I know them well. They’re relatively smart people, but terribly uneducated. They’re not exactly poor, but they’ve escaped absolute poverty by cleverly taking advantage of some lucky opportunities that came their way. They’ve also pushed their children hard to take advantage of education they couldn’t get, and their children are raising middle-class families (and helping Mom and Dad out if needed.)
My point is, these people worked hard but also had a generous measure of luck. They’re partly supporting distant relatives who aren’t nearly as lucky, but just as hardworking.
Personal success requires hard work, luck, and the ability to recognize an opportunity when it tries to slip past you.
If you have all the money in the world, but haven’t made something for yourself — haven’t experienced hard work plus the joy of grasping an opportunity as it sidles on past — you haven’t experienced personal success. And I still maintain that it is people caught in this situation who are fooled into thinking that they’re entitled to be right all the time. They just haven’t been brought up short by reality enough.
I am not seeing the luck these people made a good decision to leave home and family go to the U.S and work like slaves? they are now reaping the reward as are their distant family members.
And they probably are not even white?
I for one am coming close to calling ‘troll’ on this one, who’s with me?
Dont be a jerk Dave.
“as for anti vacs becoming a movement, if they did become a large group I would guess that a lot of people would re think their position in the light of new facts.”
You seriously cannot be this naive.
Richard – your comments are very aggressive, you know; I don’t think you have much right to call anyone else a jerk. Your comments are very aggressive and they’re not very carefully argued. This is, obviously, a problem, as I’ve pointed out before. I’ve asked you before to slow down, think more carefully, and then write more carefully. You seem to post headlong at top speed; this does not combine well with belligerence. Again: please slow down, think carefully, then write carefully.
OB, some time ago you described yourself as cranky and easily irritated, but I think you still show an amazing patience and faith in people’s goodwill…
dzd, Yep! Obviously Richard doesn’t spell out the obvious: these new facts would be children dropping like flies right, left and centre. Well, I am sure it would cause people to reconsider their position. A bit late maybe?
Personally, as I have said before, I am with Dave…
Arnaud When I grew up measles and other diseases were common,I had measles and mumps and my brother had rubela so did most of the kids I grew up with, doctors would tell mothers to stick all their kids in one room together so they could all get the measles out of the way at the same time(bloody stupid advice)you know what? kids never dropped like flies.
O.B I should not have called Dave a jerk it just pissed me off that he called me a troll,you moderate this site not him( if there are trolls to be called you call them) I dont mean to be agresive I will try harder in future.
d.z.d to kill a disease you do not require 100 percent take up of vacination, the anti vacs know this fact hence why they free load on others, if other people start to emulate them in large numbers they would then make a fresh calculation on harm v risk in light of this developement,how is that naieve you could argue that it is selfish(I would agree with you)but a parents duty to their child is a selfish duty.
From Johann Hari:
“Panicked parents assumed that, since it was on the news, there must some evidence for it, and in several areas vaccination rates have fallen by 30 percent. The result? Britain’s chief scientist, Sir David King, warned last week that it is now probable fifty to one hundred kids will die of measles because of the disinformation campaign spearheaded by the Mail. It’s rare a newspaper actually manages to kill people, but Sir David King believes they may pull it off.”
Or this:
“Even more startlingly, it was found that when MMR was suspended in Japan due to production problems, autism rates held steady – but 90 extra children died of measles.”
‘they would then make a fresh calculation’
Richard, you seem to be assuming that vaccination refusers have each individually made a cynical epidemiological calculation, rather than being stampeded by tabloid pseudo-science.
‘I understand the risk’ may just as well translate as ‘I read the Daily Mail and believe every word.’
As we are already seeing a resurgence in these diseases, your assumption would seem to be unwarranted.
And, be honest, if this story were about mullahs de-railing a project that would see a permanent end to TB in Africa by claiming it was a western plot to infect children with AIDS, would you take the same sympathetic line to the refusers and – more germanely – those who influence them by mumbo-jumbo and flat out lies?
Richard – I moderate this site, as you say, but I’m not here 24 hours a day. You generally post when I’m not here. Your posts, for the reasons I indicated, often create problems. I have to tell you, I don’t mind if other people attempt to moderate you. The fact is you need moderation (in both senses). Please do try harder. Slow down. Think. Think again.
If you don’t want to be called a troll, try harder not to sound like one. You know your posts are provocative – that means they have to be well-argued, or else they will sound trollish. That’s just inevitable. (Inevitable here. Not on all sites of course, but on this one.)
I cant speak for daily mail readers Don but I am just telling you what I came across as I said earlier I ran into several of these types a couple of years ago (hardly supprising because m.m.r was a real hot potato)and that was exactly the sort of stuff they would say, probably because they were upper middle class types they did not see their children as part of a herd but as individuals,almost to a person they felt the goverment was lying to them about vacination risks(this might be because goverments lie about vacination risks) and over stated the risk of the diseases in question,and for my part I kind of agree with them even though I do see the need for vacination, and just for the record because you all think I am Atilla the hun on this isue my grandauter had the m.m.r vacination,I had my say but the girls overuled me as they always do.
“Richard – your comments are very aggressive, you know”
Are they…..strident??
G,
Slow down.
Richard called you on your arguement and you twisted and turned in response. Flailing at the keyboard won’t fan away the scent of straw.