.
Probably most of my colleagues would be very annoyed to hear me say
so, but if you were to take all the pediatricians and stuff them in a
barrel and fling them over Niagara Falls, the world would not be so
badly off, but the same cannot be said about vaccines: Getting rid of
them would be a real disaster. Second only to providing clean water and
properly dealing with sewage, the use of vaccines has contributed more
to our quality and length of life than any other medical or public
health intervention.
But not everybody understands that, partly because vaccines have been
so successful at eliminating many serious infectious diseases that
there is no longer any public perception of risk from the illnesses they
prevent. But there are other forces at play that make some parents
reluctant to have their children immunized, even though they care a lot
about their children’s health. The Internet permits people to write
anything they want, and apparently people do just that, authoritatively,
no matter whether their positions are (or are not) sensible or
rational.
To complicate things, we are all influenced by a fascinating
psychological mechanism that automatically imputes gravitas, wisdom, and
authority to anything presented in Times New Roman, even if the same
message would be dismissed out of hand if scrawled in chalk on a
sidewalk. Googling “immunization” will give you lots and lots of hits
that probably ought to have been written in chalk on a sidewalk.