People are very capable of mental gymnastics when it comes to risk assessing things they don't understand.
If you're nervous about potential side effects, what do you do? You probably go on the internet and look up vaccine safety and examples of vaccine disasters. If you do that you'll see articles about UK, Finland and Sweden seeing neurological damage to children who received the 2009 seasonal flu vaccine...articles about the 1955 Polio vaccine disaster in the USA which left 40,000 children sick and 200 children paralysed. There have been other vaccine accidents in recent years, all over the world. In some cases these were vaccines that had very long trial phases.
The reality is that even in this headline cases we're talking about tens or hundreds of serious adverse effects out of millions of vaccine doses with the exception of the US Polio incident that was closer to 1 in 1000.
Most people can't comprehend huge numbers and find it hard to quantify risks. All they see is true stories about vaccine side effects. These are the seeds that lead to refusal to have a vaccine and also feed into the conspiracy theories we hear about.
Once again, not trying to argue that the vaccines aren't safe, just that I understand how people can convince themselves that they arent.
People are very capable of mental gymnastics when it comes to risk assessing things they don't understand.
If you're nervous about potential side effects, what do you do? You probably go on the internet and look up vaccine safety and examples of vaccine disasters. If you do that you'll see articles about UK, Finland and Sweden seeing neurological damage to children who received the 2009 seasonal flu vaccine...articles about the 1955 Polio vaccine disaster in the USA which left 40,000 children sick and 200 children paralysed. There have been other vaccine accidents in recent years, all over the world. In some cases these were vaccines that had very long trial phases.
The reality is that even in this headline cases we're talking about tens or hundreds of serious adverse effects out of millions of vaccine doses with the exception of the US Polio incident that was closer to 1 in 1000.
Most people can't comprehend huge numbers and find it hard to quantify risks. All they see is true stories about vaccine side effects. These are the seeds that lead to refusal to have a vaccine and also feed into the conspiracy theories we hear about.
Once again, not trying to argue that the vaccines aren't safe, just that I understand how people can convince themselves that they arent.