So much misinformation, so little time

Most people don’t understand science, even on the most basic level.  Put more specifically, most people don’t understand scientific skepticism–the obligatory frame of mind from which one must view scientific research in order to benefit from it.  Maintaining doubt, if you’re unused to it, hurts your head.  Certainty certainly feels better.  It has an aesthetic advantage vis-a-vis skepticism.  Unfortunately, in this case at least, beauty is not truth.  I’m certainly no scientist, but I understand skepticism; I live skepticism.  

I know of families who refuse to vaccinate their children due to the recent hype about vaccines and autism.  Thanks to them, measles is on the rise.  And I resent their position, not only because it is uninformed, but because their children become vectors capable of carrying sickness to other children.  In fact, their relative safety as unvaccinated children is only possible because of the high percentage of vaccinated ones.  So, in that respect, they get by in their irrationality only by the reasonableness of others.  

But, I’ll admit, as a new parent, one of the emotions I’ve encountered most often is fear:  fear that I’m doing my son more harm than good.  And that fear finds refuse in decisions large and small.  Is this food nutritious?  Does he possibly harbor some allergy to it?  Is he on track developmentally?  Is this edge too sharp, this surface too hard, this bath water too hot?  People who willfully harm children are beyond the pale.  No reasonable person wants to harm any child, much less his or her own.  So, the fear, I understand.  But the willingness to jump ship from the established practice of vaccinating to the new fad of abstaining from the same based on a handful of, as it turns out, badly researched studies and a few celebrity endorsements is something I don’t understand.  I will, perhaps, lay the blame on the national press, which, in its endless quest for sensationalism and misunderstanding of what it means to deliver a fair and balanced account (read: it does not mean giving equal time and weight to every crack-pot theory), has under-served all of us here.

So, for any well-meaning but misguided friends of yours who might be on the vaccination abstinence bandwagon, here’s a very readable piece from Salon that gives the lie to the nonsense.  The AMA and AAP concur.  That’s the truth for now.  Scientific truth is always truth with a lower-case “t.”  Its truths change over time.  By all means, maintain your skepticism, even as you guard against the very charlatans who will attempt to use it against you.