Amy Wallace writing for Wired: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All:
The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
And an anecdote from Brent Simmon’s in response.
Via Daring Fireball.
Comments
While innoculation has it’s roots in well-founded science, yet was met with reactionary scaremongery that went so far as to suggest that those given the smallpox vaccine (derived from cowpox, the bovine ‘version’ of the disease) may turn into cows, many of the present concerns seem to eminate from a justifiable mistrust of a health care system which, like that of food, has become an industry in the hands of private individuals whose concern is not the health of the nation but the maximisation of profits. I do not wish to suggest that turning to ‘pseudo-science’ is defensible, but it is perhaps one of a myriad of inevitable responses to a health care system which is based on research which is often only funded/published where it suits the interests of the drug company which funded it. Cancer has risen almost exponentially through much of the 20th Century, the instances of autism have rocketed in recent decades, the case is similar for ‘intolerances’, allergies, auto-immune diseases. Today’s privately funded science has little interest in looking for causes, of which any number of the changes we have experienced since the turn of the 20th Century have been implicated, with varying degrees of credibility.
Mercury is used to prolong the shelf life of vaccinces, not for the good of the future recipients, but to cut down on costs. Neither is one person’s story of a difficult time with chicken pox going to add to the debate any more than those with ‘underlying health problems’ dying after being given a vaccine for cervical cancer or swine flu (sorry, H5N1 as the pig industry successfully had it officially renamed) in the UK. Whilst panicking parents may be equally unconstructive, a healthy dose (no pun intended) of scepticism is not necessarily anti-science, indeed it was a pre-condition for the European scientific revolution of the 17th & 18th Centuries. The undue and less-than-democratic influence of the drug companies in the making of US legislation gives little cause for comfort (see http://drbenkim.com/autism-mercury-robert-kennedy.htm) and while I remain unconvinced of the links to that disparate collection of phenomena clumsily bundled together as autism, I remain suspicious of public health policy where the science cannot be questioned and happens to results in considerable monetary gain for a few. The argument over the flouridation of the water springs to mind. See this particularly interesting account of a former advocate, John Colquhoun, Principal Dental Officer for Auckland, New Zealand. — http://www.fluoride-journal.com/98 – 31-2/312103.htm). Those parents who in the 80’s — and indeed up to the present day, as the pressure remains on health authorities from ‘independent’ flouridation societies — were against the flouridation of the water supply would no doubt also have been considered as ‘panicked’ and ‘anti-science’.
I was hoping I might get something out of you. Excellent points. Can’t fault a thing.