Oh, I used to be that optimistic and idealistic too. Unfortunately, my day-to-day reality as beaten that out of me.
-Dr. Imago
You have my sympathies. I have found that changing my job, which significantly altered my day-to-day activities, I was able to regain a great deal of the optimism of my youth. :shysmile
That would be all well and good if they LISTENED to the answers to their questions instead of harping on and on and on the same old answered questions. But, nobody listens, they just harp on and on. and ON AND ON. IT never ends, no matter how many answers they get. They just go back to the quacks for the same old tired garbage dredged all over the internet. One gets tired of answering the same questions over and over again when nobody asking them listens to the answers. They just want to accuse with the same old tired lies about conspiracies and non-related health problems. ON and ON and ON.
Eos, I'm going to delete most of what you've posted. You spend a lot words moaning about how awful it is that many people listen to lying quacks instead of respected medical officials about such things as vaccinations. You call them liars many many times.
The thing that Ivan and I and some others have been trying to harp on has to do with being able to trust in what the people setting policy are recommending. The issue of bias on the part of the CDC vaccine committee was a big one for me. When I actually started looking into vaccination issues over a decade ago, I was quite disillusions to discover that so many members required official waivers of the conflict of interest regulations in order to participate on the committee.
Now, I understand the need for experts and that it's difficult to obtain the quality of specialists in the area who don't have such ties. I can certainly understand that the committee couldn't function without having some such members participate. But I don't find that need an acceptable excuse for having the majority (and sometimes all) of the members having such ties with the vaccine manufactures.
The fact that when I actually researched the issue, I found that was the case caused me to lose trust in their recommendations. The committee membership as a whole was going to be biased in favor of recommending vaccines. I could no longer trust their recommendations.*
Now, I'm intelligent enough to research stuff for myself. I can figure out that when the vaccine committee publishes their recommendations and identifies one of the reasons for recommending certain vaccines at certain ages because it's easier to get compliance, that isn't a consideration I need to apply to my own, personal, decision-making process.
But most people have not the time, the inclination, or (dare I say it) the ability to read and understand the actual policy recommendations and the reasoning behind them. They have to trust someone else. It would be nice if it were the vaccine committee and not their homopathic counselor. But frankly, I can't blame them for not trusting the vaccine committee recommendations. I don't feel I can; instead I feel I have to do the research myself.
If a father beats his children he gets arrested, the children taken...
If a parent tries to prevent his child from recieving a life saving blood transfusion based on religious dogma, what happens?
If a parent prevents their children from getting immunized (protection from serious, and potentially FATAL diseases), what happens.
I know the details, the degrees, are not the same in each case, but are we not sitting atop a slippery slope? Where do the rights of parents to choose end, and the duty of the health profession and lawmakers to protect those who cannot protect themselves begin.
Things to ponder.
TAM
Indeed, serious question to ponder. I think vaccines get so much debate space because they are quite literally on the bleeding edge. With some vaccines, I think it's reasonable to require them, at least of public school children. Other vaccines, not so reasonable and, IMO, an unwarrented intrusion of public policy into private medical decisions.
* I think the vaccine committee members are most likely decent, intelligent, hard-working individuals devoted to developing policies to safely and effectively improve the health of the general public. That I think they are biased is no more a denigration of them than to say that I think they are human beings with the normal failings of all human beings.
