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mon petit blogue sans importance...
flu vaccine scares...
I'm tired of all the quacks out there touting all sorts of imbecilities about the H1N1 flu and its vaccine. My level-headed friend Alison pointed out an article published by McGill.
This is a most excellent article about the different scary stories out there that have people panicking about the vaccine, and getting a lot of people to not get vaccinated, which is frustrating to someone like me who, in a few days, will be holding a newborn and bringing her to various holiday parties.
Problem is, anyone who believes the 30-second shocking blurbs from the quacks out there is just not the type of person who would actually read such an article, even if you threw it in their face.
The fundamental problem is that it's often rather complex to explain to everyone why they're wrong - they prefer to believe the too-quick arguments that way too often confuse causality and correlation.
There's a really good explanation of this problem here - why are people quickly convinced by those quacks but are then very hard to convince otherwise, even faced with hard data from knowledgeable people:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/why-putting-climate-change-on-trial-is-a-terrible-idea.ars
excerpt:
"The gist of this is that it can easy to make a simple, intuitive presentation of an argument that is simply wrong. In contrast, reality is often complex and counterintuitive, and providing all the details needed to understand it can be arduous. It's the difference between multiplying two prime numbers to encrypt something, and figuring out which prime numbers are needed to decrypt it. "
(read the "The one-way hash argument" section, about half-way down - it's short and really good; the rest of the article is irrelevant here).
I've stopped getting frustrated about this, but i have yet to come up with a good strategy against it. I just calmly try to explain my point of view to the people i care about, and ignore the others...
by wiswaud
on 19 November 2009
Tags:
english, quacks
Comments
wiswaud 19 November 2009 12:45 EST
lol andrea - it's a good point, and yes, this flu doesn't seem, after all, *much* more dangerous than the seasonal flu. But it does seem to be more contagious, and it also can cause (rare, but still) damage amongst the young and healthy, which is different than the seasonal flu.
My concern is simply protecting my newborn-to-be: she can't be vaccinated, and any flu can be quite dangerous to a very young baby, so i'm asking those closest to us to get vaccinated, that's all. The point is not simply to protect yourself, it's to protect people who can't for one reason or another get vaccinated. And the other point is simply that however low the risks are with the flu itself, the risks associated with the vaccine are actually much lower anyways.
And you have basically zero risk of spreading the cholera :)
My biggest problem is the quackery that goes around against the vaccine - if you're healthy, know the facts, and aren't around fragile beings, then it's alright to make an *informed* decision... but i'm seeing lots of people who won't vaccinate their 1 year-olds because of this crappy information going around. But their babies are actually at risk if they catch this flu (or any other flu, really, but this one seems worse).
Copyright © 2009 Éric St-Jean
Andrea 19 November 2009 12:20 EST
Quack! Quack! I do not think this vaccine is dangerous or that there is a world conspiration BUT, having read and listened to many health experts, I am convinced that this swine flu is less dangerous than normal seasonal flu. The experts that I listened to might be wrong, of course, but hey, you have to trust somebody and take your chances. I am not going to take the vaccine, if I catch the swine flu and die, it means that my genes were not worthy of being passed to the next generation (not that they would, in any case). I am not trying to convince people not to get vaccinated, but I wish people, especially here in Sweden, would stop trying to convince me to get vaccinated, using weird logic arguments, like "you should get vaccinated so you don't infect other people". Well, if the other people got vaccinated they have nothing to fear from me, have they? By the same logic I should have the right to expect people to get vaccinated against cholera, because I am particularly scared of cholera.
Sorry for the rant.
I promise I won't cough in your direction :)