All anti-vaxxers share one very important thing in common.
Wait, let me amend that.
In addition to ignorance of basic science, statistics and logic anti-vaxxers share another important characteristic: they are ruled by fear!
Anti-vaxxers are afraid of anything they don’t understand and they don’t understand vaccines. They have chosen to band together and create an identity around that fear.
Anti-vaxxers are not victims of vaccines, merely victims of their own unreasoning fear.
Sure they tell themselves and others that their community is united by refusal to gullibly accept the assurances of experts, but they easily fall prey the unreasoning and unreasonable fear generated by gullibly accepting warnings from quacks and charlatans.
Imagine if our distant ancestors, the ones that anti-vaxxers believe they are emulating, had behaved in the same fearful manner.
“Fire? OMG, fire is dangerous. People could get burned. There is no way that I am cooking my meat before eating it!”
“Killing animals with spears? What if someone’s aim is off. They could kill me instead of the wild boar. No, I’ll take my chances getting in close and bashing wild animals over the head with my club.”
“Deliberately planting seeds in the ground? You have got to be kidding me! How do we know that the seeds we plant deliberately will grow into plants as safe and nutritious as the ones we gather? They might be poisoned so we better not eat them.”
Or much, much later:
“Sorry, but there is no way I am getting on an airplane. If we were meant to fly, we’d have been born with wings.”
Sounds ridiculous, right? The innovations that make life longer and less arduous today were new and poorly understood once. That made them scary, but being scary is not the same thing as being dangerous. Once people learned more about these innovations, and observed them in action, they embraced them.
Our distant ancestors could be forgiven for fearing innovations since they had no way to understand how they worked. Contemporary anti-vax advocates, in contrast, are ignorant because of their own actions. The knowledge of how vaccines work and their safety is available to anyone who cares to learn. But anti-vaxxers prefer to remain ignorant and afraid; indeed they proudly build their identity around their ignorance and fear.
In his first Inaugural Address, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt famously said:
…[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Roosevelt was right. Unreasoning fear made the economic disaster worse and more prolonged. Guided by his wise counsel and bolstered by the government programs he created, the economy began to recover and people shook off the debilitating effects of fear.
In truth, the only thing anti-vaxxers have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat against disease into advance!
Unreasoning fear of vaccines and companies that produce them has allowed vaccine preventable diseases to claw back from the edge of extinction. The only effective way to protect ourselves from these diseases is to be guided by the counsel of experts in immunology, microbiology and public health. Only then can we shake off the debilitating effects of the nonsense peddled by the anti-vax movement.
Roosevelt also said this:
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Anti-vaxxers are not victims of vaccines, merely victims of their own unreasoning fear, the result of their ignorance of science and gullible acceptance of the nattering of quacks and charlatans.
