panic over vaccinations
By Nicolai Buhr
Epidemiology
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Wired News recently ran an article exploring some of the public's reaction to vaccination programs. This sentence captures much of the problem:
"But researchers, alas, can't respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy -- not if they're going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines. But that phrasing -- what sounds like equivocation -- is just enough to allow doubts to not only remain but to fester."
The full article is here, and is worth a read.
Of course, as this image from the 1950s shows, it's not like fear-mongering over such initiatives is a recent development:
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