Interesting look at why antivaxxers think they way they do, and how their unique mindset makes them so sure of their stupid decisions.

kleinbl00:

I don't know how interesting it is. It's someone with a pet theory attempting to shoehorn public behavior into that theory. When it doesn't fit the theory, they argue that it's because the behavior they're observing is correct instead of considering that their theory might be wrong.

    Using Latent Profile Analysis, we identified three profiles (i.e., groups), interpretable as vaccine “accepters”, “fence sitters”, and “rejecters”, each characterised by a distinct pattern of vaccination attitudes and moral preferences.

If I understand it correctly, "latent profile analysis" is literally "eyeballing it." They're basically running a Meyers-Briggs on 300 volunteers and painting them with a "liberty/no liberty" brush. It doesn't say anything about why people in the anti-vax movement hold the beliefs that they do - but that one's easy. A fundamental distrust in medicine as they have experienced it leads to distrust in vaccines. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Johnny Gruelle, creator of Raggedy Ann and Andy, was anti-vax because his daughter died of an infected vaccination site. Pakistanis are anti-vax because they believe the WHO and other NGOs are CIA front organizations (it doesn't help that the CIA used the WHO and other NGOs as front organizations while looking for bin Laden). The anti-vax hives of Topanga and Eugene, OR are anti-vax because their primary medical communities are Mothering.com and the like, which are all about self-affirmation and the power of positive thinking combined with the drawbacks and complaints of interaction with more conventional medical establishments.

Every time a mother asks a question at a doctor's office and gets a "because I said so I'm a doctor" eyeroll, that mother's children is vulnerable to medical-care-by-Internet. Australia is particularly vulnerable to this because their NHS is a my-way-or-the-highway organization; Canada had lower instances of anti-vax fervor because if you looked up "vaccines" in Canada you'd get a helpful site of what your kid needed, when and why while looking it up in the US got you a single page that said, effectively, "do what your doctor says because he's a doctor."

Vaccination rates are actually pretty steady worldwide. The issue is that individual enclaves of anti-vax parents spring up where peer pressure allows rates to drop below 90%. You can blame the Internet for that; science-free crusaders with Wordpress can write far more captivating narrative than the DoH or FDA. If it was somehow "mindset" related this would have been a problem long before Wakefield when in fact things have been largely nascent since 1905.


posted 1880 days ago