tl;dr: you can’t convince anti-vaxxers that their opinions are based on quackery, and trying to do so only deepens their delusion. Also, fuck Andrew Wakefield, he tortured autistic kids and caused irreversible damage to public health for money, I hope he gets set on fire.
Jesus this is really bleak. And I have to imagine it’s a similar case for various other manufactured conspiracies regarding other scientific topics, elections, LGBTQ+ people, etc. I genuinely don’t know how we recover when a third of our population is willfully and militantly misinformed.
From the study:
RESULTS:
None of the interventions increased parental intent to vaccinate a future child. Refuting claims of an MMR/autism link successfully reduced misperceptions that vaccines cause autism but nonetheless decreased intent to vaccinate among parents who had the least favorable vaccine attitudes. In addition, images of sick children increased expressed belief in a vaccine/autism link and a dramatic narrative about an infant in danger increased self-reported belief in serious vaccine side effects.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive. More study of pro-vaccine messaging is needed.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
A related bit of depression: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/133/4/e835/32713/Effective-Messages-in-Vaccine-Promotion-A
tl;dr: you can’t convince anti-vaxxers that their opinions are based on quackery, and trying to do so only deepens their delusion. Also, fuck Andrew Wakefield, he tortured autistic kids and caused irreversible damage to public health for money, I hope he gets set on fire.
Jesus this is really bleak. And I have to imagine it’s a similar case for various other manufactured conspiracies regarding other scientific topics, elections, LGBTQ+ people, etc. I genuinely don’t know how we recover when a third of our population is willfully and militantly misinformed.
From the study:
RESULTS:
None of the interventions increased parental intent to vaccinate a future child. Refuting claims of an MMR/autism link successfully reduced misperceptions that vaccines cause autism but nonetheless decreased intent to vaccinate among parents who had the least favorable vaccine attitudes. In addition, images of sick children increased expressed belief in a vaccine/autism link and a dramatic narrative about an infant in danger increased self-reported belief in serious vaccine side effects.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive. More study of pro-vaccine messaging is needed.
The author, Brendan Nyhan, is a political scientist. He’s published many similar papers about misinformation, scandals, fake news, and politics in journalism and social media. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=SbAA1v4AAAAJ&hl=en