No
dearth of advice on the internet how to convince anti-vaxxers to get
their shots or rather more accurately, encourage them to get their
children vaccinated. From professors to young mothers, an array of
well-meaning people seek to show them the error of their ways. Does this
approach work? More pertinently, could it? Is it possible to change
minds without understanding why they think the way they do? I too used
to think that summoning an abundance of rigorous, irrefutable facts
would suffice. Is it though? Would it work on me? Honestly, I'm not
sure.
Facts, figures, data appeal more to the
intellect, less to emotions. A bullet-point list of truisms likely to
provoke approving nods from vaccine aficionados would fall off
anti-vaxxers' backs like the proverbial water. Just the way it goes with
entrenched beliefs, appeals to reason alone don't suffice. The amalgam
of conspiracy theories about government, big pharma, science, the
medical profession that typically fuel anti-vaxxers is based on a mix of
unrealistic expectations, mistrust and fear, fear
for the well-being of their children. Wouldn't appeal to reason
boomerang, likely perceived as patronizing? As well, the internet so
easily fosters a bubble mentality. Stay ensconced in echo chambers that
parrot one's own viewpoint and one need never subject oneself to the
discomfort of questioning one's belief. The problem won't go away
through mocking/hectoring/lecturing, and is likely of our own making.
An
argument more likely to pierce such a bubble would be personal accounts
of former anti-vaxxers who changed their minds, and got themselves and
their children vaccinated. Such people once inhabited similar mind-sets.
Their accounts would resonate more because they'd appeal to emotion
instead of to reason alone. They'd address the underlying fear that
drives much of this thinking. Former anti-vaxxers had the same fear and
yet they found a way to surmount them. Recently, some former
anti-vaxxers have come forward with just such stories of changes in
stance (1, 2). Sharing these essays with current anti-vaxxers would do
both them and the rest of us more of a service compared to an exchange
across entrenched beliefs that's only likely to become increasingly
rancorous.
How is the problem one of our own
making? Exploring this issue opens a bigger can of worms about current
human culture and collective memory and in its wake leaves more
uncomfortable questions. Each of us comes from somewhere, a specific
family, culture, history. Each of us living today has to only go back
one, two or three generations at most to find accounts of relatives who
died or were maimed from polio, small pox, pertussis, rubella, rabies,
tetanus, vaccine-preventable diseases all. What happened to their
stories? Why aren't the accounts of their lives and tragic,
vaccine-preventable disabilities or deaths part of their families' lore?
Surely it can't be that anti-vaxxers have absolutely no one in their
20th century family tree who died from a vaccine-preventable disease?
That would just defy statistics. This is the deeply unsettling bit.
School and formal education attend to one aspect of identity formation
and beliefs. The other part comes from family and community. The recent
anti-vaxxer movement in places like the US and Australia suggests that
something fundamental may be changing in the way generational
information and knowledge is transmitted within families and
communities. Or maybe I'm the fool for walking down this path. Maybe selective amnesia always attended collective human memory. In which case, we are and will always be fools condemned to repeat the past, to paraphrase George Santayana.
Yet somehow I suspect I'm not wrong in thinking increasingly isolated
online living and entrenched mistrust against one big group or the other
goes hand in hand. If I'm right, our current mode of increasingly
disembodied online living is only more likely to bring out the potential
for irrationality in each and every one of us. Maybe anti-vaxxers and
other fringe groups are merely harbingers of worse to come.
Foot-notes
- Kashana Cauley, The Atlantic, Mar 6, 2015. I Used to Be an Anti-Vaxer
- Sage Stargrove, The Guardian, Feb 28, 2015. I'm finally getting vaccinated. But not because of your shaming
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-advice-on-how-to-convince-anti-vaxxers-to-get-their-shots/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala
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