Vaccination and Freedumb – Centre for Inquiry Canada

Science Seer

Freedumb: Thinking your personal choices are more important than public safety. Average life spans have increased by decades over the past two hundred years. Why? Vaccines have immunized us against some of the world’s greatest killers.

When I was four years old, I lost my best friend to polio. At six, I went to school with another good friend, who had been severely disabled by polio. My parents took me to a rehabilitation centre where we saw a huge room filled with iron lungs, each one with a child inside. Parents didn’t let their children swim with other kids; we had the March of Dimes at school, each student bringing dimes to tuck into small folders to help pay for vaccine research. The Salk vaccine in 1955 was a longed-for literal lifesaver. Global polio cases dropped from hundreds of thousands to 33 in 2018. Aside from isolated pockets in Pakistan and Baluchistan, it was essentially extinguished.

Smallpox was the first ravaging disease completely eliminated by vaccine. Smallpox killed and disfigured incalculable numbers of people globally. Ask an old person, she’ll show you her nickel-sized vaccination scar on her arm just like mine. Children don’t die from communicable diseases because they receive some combination of the following routine vaccinations.

Every time I stepped on a nail, drove a fishhook into my hand, or cut myself (all relatively frequent; I was an active little brat), I’d get a tetanus shot. Ever read a description of death due to lock jaw? It isn’t pleasant. I’ve never suffered.

Back in the day we never questioned medical advice; it was just a given. There were almost no alternate sources of information that might confuse, so people with expertise were highly trusted, especially doctors. Got a brain tumour? Do you call a brain surgeon or a plumber? Got a septic drain problem? Do you call a brain surgeon or a plumber?

My first grandchild was completely debilitated by autism. My ex-daughter-in-law still believes vaccinations were the cause, despite that theory being completely debunked.

“The widespread fear that vaccines increase risk of autism originated with a 1997 study published by Andrew Wakefield, a British surgeon. The article was published in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, suggesting that the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine was increasing autism in British children. The paper has since been completely discredited due to serious procedural errors, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, and ethical violations. Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license and the paper was retracted from The Lancet.”

Vaccines are not perfect and there is always some risk. That risk is minuscule compared with the probable benefit. By the time a vaccine is produced, it has gone through a very vigorous vetting process. If there’s a vaccine available, get it. End of story.

Now we see people like Anthony Fauci, a global authority for viral epidemics, being ignored or belittled. Rather than listen and learn, many people prefer injecting bleach or taking ivermectin (good if you’ve got a tape worm), because they listen to some ignorant clod spouting off on TV. But it’s like the brain tumor or septic drain. Listen to experts — people who know.

So some truckers don’t want to have to be vaccinated. Tough, I say. Vaccination against an epidemic is the most important single move we can make to bring on herd immunity. Don’t be a Freedumb lover.

Comments (2)

In 1954, I and my classmates were excused from school, so that our parents could take us to the outdoor parking lot of Montreal’s St. Mary’s Hospital to line up for an injection of Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine. I cannot remember any parents of that era being anything but thrilled with this scientific development. And that unanimity was across all levels of adult formal education. Is today’s vaccine resistance all down to the internet and social media?
Alex B.

Keith Douglas says:

October 2, 2022 at 9:44 am

I blame, in part, the epistemic subjectivism that came in with the 1960s. It had always been there but staring then folks like Feyerabend and most importantly, T. Kuhn, started seriously misrepresenting the history of science and were taken up (perhaps wrongly, to some degree) as idols for a new movement that latched on to the subjectivism. The counterculture – which had many positive aspects – used these to supposedly show science is “just another story amongst others” and spread around like crazy because of the “everything related to the establishment is bad”. That Feyerabend was a liar and Kuhn’s thesis (from _Structure_) is, taken literally, logically false, never really played a role. And now we’ve had almost 3 generations of scholars in some fields who grew up with the thesis that science is just politics or worse.

Those who know the story may wonder why I did not start with the French side, like B. Latour. This is because they are largely riffing on Kuhn in the sense they regard the thesis of “cognitive content plays no role” as already demonstrated. (If I can apply a Collins-esque phrase to make the view easily understood – if crazily wrong.)

This is all darn shame beyond the now very real practical consequences (Latour for example said he was going to be quiet for a while when he realized hist views were being taken up by the GW Bush administration; it doesn’t not seem to have worked. and we know how long ago that was.)

Those on the outside (and I am now; I wasn’t in the revival of the 1990s and early 2000s) may miss that there are often two forms of each of the extreme theses; a banal one like “science is a social activity and what the truth is debated” is quickly a replacement for the extreme forms like “science is social through and through and what is truth is a matter of sociality”. Note there’s even a middle ground there that is also largely false – even what it is *taken* to be truth is not a matter of sociality, at least *alone*. Lone mavericks or outsiders to *some* degree can be right, but they are increasing (though the history of science) never epistemic outsiders. Einstein may have worked in a patent office (and not in a physics department at a university) in his “miracle year” of 1905 but he had the degrees, read journals, communicated with others on the subject, etc.

Comments are closed.

Comments (2) on “Vaccination and Freedumb”

Alex B. says:

October 1, 2022 at 8:10 pm

In 1954, I and my classmates were excused from school, so that our parents could take us to the outdoor parking lot of Montreal’s St. Mary’s Hospital to line up for an injection of Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine. I cannot remember any parents of that era being anything but thrilled with this scientific development. And that unanimity was across all levels of adult formal education. Is today’s vaccine resistance all down to the internet and social media?
Alex B.
1. Keith Douglas says:
  
  October 2, 2022 at 9:44 am
  
  I blame, in part, the epistemic subjectivism that came in with the 1960s. It had always been there but staring then folks like Feyerabend and most importantly, T. Kuhn, started seriously misrepresenting the history of science and were taken up (perhaps wrongly, to some degree) as idols for a new movement that latched on to the subjectivism. The counterculture – which had many positive aspects – used these to supposedly show science is “just another story amongst others” and spread around like crazy because of the “everything related to the establishment is bad”. That Feyerabend was a liar and Kuhn’s thesis (from _Structure_) is, taken literally, logically false, never really played a role. And now we’ve had almost 3 generations of scholars in some fields who grew up with the thesis that science is just politics or worse.
  
  Those who know the story may wonder why I did not start with the French side, like B. Latour. This is because they are largely riffing on Kuhn in the sense they regard the thesis of “cognitive content plays no role” as already demonstrated. (If I can apply a Collins-esque phrase to make the view easily understood – if crazily wrong.)
  
  This is all darn shame beyond the now very real practical consequences (Latour for example said he was going to be quiet for a while when he realized hist views were being taken up by the GW Bush administration; it doesn’t not seem to have worked. and we know how long ago that was.)
  
  Those on the outside (and I am now; I wasn’t in the revival of the 1990s and early 2000s) may miss that there are often two forms of each of the extreme theses; a banal one like “science is a social activity and what the truth is debated” is quickly a replacement for the extreme forms like “science is social through and through and what is truth is a matter of sociality”. Note there’s even a middle ground there that is also largely false – even what it is *taken* to be truth is not a matter of sociality, at least *alone*. Lone mavericks or outsiders to *some* degree can be right, but they are increasing (though the history of science) never epistemic outsiders. Einstein may have worked in a patent office (and not in a physics department at a university) in his “miracle year” of 1905 but he had the degrees, read journals, communicated with others on the subject, etc.