In April 2014, a survey by the National Consumers League (NCL) found that 29% of adults believe that autism is a result of vaccination, and the number is higher for parents under 18. To put these numbers into perspective, the more parents reject vaccinations, the more endangered other children are from preventable diseases. Such diseases include measles, which is at the center of a multi-state outbreak linked to the Disneyland Resort theme parks. With many of the measles cases from the outbreak caused by a lack of vaccination and the sheer number of vaccine skeptics reported by NCL’s survey, the medical community and the medically informed needed to approach anti-vaccination in a way that sends a message stronger than a simple “stop.”
Baby being vaccinated.
Image source: Kari Tapales
A segment of SciShow, hosted by Hank Green, goes into the copious reasons why parents refuse to vaccinate their children, and the logic behind the reasons is not as evident as the medically informed public would expect. This episode explores the different types of cognitive biases that go on in the process of understanding “in the absence of explanation.” Generally, people tend to focus more on dissecting why something bad happened, as opposed to the reason behind a good outcome. This cognitive bias is inevitably transferred into parents’ decisions on vaccination. Another such bias is the desire to have a factor to blame for a certain outcome–some people look internally, while others search for external factors. According to Green, parents of children with autism will therefore search for a culpable factor behind their child’s diagnosis, and vaccination appears to be a likely candidate. There are many such cognitive biases that prevent us from processing an understanding based on facts only because cognitive biases exist to fill in the blanks of what is not fully explained. With this being said, anti-vaccination is not justified, but the approach towards vaccine skepticism can be understood.
With the internet, information travels to parents more quickly than they can travel to their general physician. Because of this, parents are more exposed to the information over the internet with varying reliability. Professional medical advice now has to compete with the rate and distribution of the information on the internet to help the public make good decisions. In order to effectively consult with patients, doctors need to address different types of patient concerns about vaccinations and be responsible for “maintaining public trust in vaccination.” The disconnect between doctors and patients is arguably one of the prime reasons that the anti-vaccination community formed initially and should be one of the first issues addressed in order to mitigate the contraction of vaccine-preventable diseases.
