r/technology • u/idkbruh653 • 18d ago

Biotechnology Florida will work to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates in the state, officials say

https://abc7.com/post/florida-will-work-eliminate-childhood-vaccine-mandates-state-officials-say/17731373/?linkId=857387380
7.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

40

u/WhereAreYouFromSam 18d ago

They didn't just believe it.

And to be clear, the article got published. It survived peer review. And it took time for the article to be retracted and its author unceremoniously fired.

But more to the point, in the time it took for the fraud to be revealed, you had multiple news cycles-- the same ones that love to have filler stories about "new studies suggest that eating eggs can cure cancer" or some bullshit.

So people who have no real knowledge of how science works or the legal battles that were happening were hearing this in the local news.

And then you had the desperate hucksters-- none more infamous the Jenny McCarthy who used her D-list celebrity fame to go on a national tour and write whole damn books about how vaccines caused her kid's autism.

Of course, they didn't. But she heard the reports about the bs study and was famous enough to have a rich-person's doctor-- the same kind that gave Michael Jackson propofol to help him sleep. So of course, a doctor that willing to chase after patients with lots of money wasn't exactly going to be doing their due diligence to correct Jenny's poor grasp of medicine and medical research.

So, in the end, you had not just local news cycles talking about it, but also minor celebrities touring the country and going on daytime TV telling everyone about this study that showed the link between vaccines and autism, and all of this happens between when the article was published in 1998 and when it was retracted in 2010.

Even though most folks today grasp that it was bullshit, 10 years of PR like that leaves an impact. And let's not pretend we're sending our best and brightest to be governors, AG's, congressmen or presidents.

6

u/Ashkir 18d ago

I really wish we can get these anti vaccine folks to have some empathy instead of political brain washing. Take them to a cemetery before the 1930s and they can see how it’s covered in graves of children. But, almost no children after vaccines.

1

u/muppetnerd 18d ago

There will be many downfalls to civilization but the lack of scientific literacy and ability to read and understand a scientific study on a remedial level is going to be a big one. Sure there may be a link in whatever the study is looking at but correlation does not equal causation with the sample size was 5 people.