By Cameron Elde, Neuroscience Student, Washington State University Vancouver
We are not born with an innate ability to tell right from wrong, nor stroll out of the womb speaking about inalienable truths. To know something we must either learn it ourselves or be taught by others. However, accepting other people at their word must be done cautiously. It is perhaps this lack of caution that allows misinformation to be so difficult to put to rest. Even today, with communication quicker than ever before, the truth can be hidden. When it comes to vaccinations, many people are mislead by propaganda.
There is a growing group of people who chose not to vaccinate their children. The danger that this presents is massive, literally gambling with the lives of their children and those around them, yet why? Many, because they believe it could give their child autism. This has become the legacy of Wakefield’s infamous retracted Lancet article that suggested the two could be linked. However, exhaustive reproducible research has found just the opposite (for example, a PLoS One study by Hornig et al., or a great study from Japan by Honda et al.), concluding that no link exists between vaccinations and autism. Nevertheless, this stance of the scientific community is not enough to convince people of the safety of vaccines.
From moose-bum.com
There are many barriers between scientific discovery and getting that discovery into public awareness. One such barrier is interpreting results. It is difficult for someone without a degree in science to come to the same conclusions stated in many research articles, yet everyone can see the similar timing between vaccinations and the onset of autism. However, just because two things happen in a similar time frame doesn’t mean that one caused the other. There are other coincidental relationships between vaccinations and autism, each with a rational explanation, but these unsubstantial connections appear to add credibility to people claiming vaccines are dangerous. The end result? People get scared and they lose trust in vaccines. This leads people to make different choices when they in reality they want the same thing: to protect their children.
We live in an imperfect world; people get sick, develop disorders. Vaccines aren’t perfect either, there are rare, yet serious, allergic reactions to them, but it isn’t autism. Additionally other people are unable to take vaccines on account of legitimate health concerns or due to religious reasons. These people depend on others getting vaccinated to limit pathogen exposure in communities; this is frequently called “herd immunity”. It would be wrong to claim that vaccines are perfectly safe, but a much greater wrong to claim they do more harm than good.