I’ve long been a fan of the YouTube channel SciShow, despite them having nearly a million times more subscribers than my own channel Risk Bites! Hank Green and his team have produced some extremely accessible and smart videos on public health since the channel started three years ago, and these should be at the top of any list of educational resources on the science of public health.
Yesterday, the team posted a particularly good video on the anti-vaccination movement. Unlike many commentators from within the science community, instead of vilifying parents who don’t get their kids vaccinated – or are hesitant about doing so – Green takes a science-grounded look at why people reject vaccines.
Green leaves no doubt from the get-go that there is no link between vaccines and autism. But he is sympathetic to why people may come to this conclusion, based on how our minds work and the inbuilt biases we all have. This reflexiveness is not only refreshing – it’s also critical if we are to address major public health issues like measles that depend on trust, empathy and partnerships, as well as the science that underpins the decisions we collectively make.
To push this home, Green concludes:
“Next time you find yourself frustrated about the decline in vaccinations in America, remember that it’s only because of the dramatic success of vaccines that we could even think of having this debate, and that those anti-vaccine activists are being driven by the exact same logic traps and cognitive biases that every one of us suffers from. Only by understanding and accepting these psychological pitfalls that we’re all so susceptible to will we be able to solve this problem. And that’s what science is all about.”
Watch the full video above – I’d highly recommend it
wonderful making the point about the affective nature of cognition generally, risk perception specifically. but BIG problems. He dwells on autism, which is no longer the principal issue in fear of vaccines. He says the rate of non vaccinating is increasing, which is true in absolute terms, but the increase itself is tiny as a rate, and TINY in terms of overall vax acceptance. Overblows the problem. And re: risk perception, he gets it wrong…the factor is not that we worry more about current risks than future ones, it’s that we worry more about risks when they offer no apparent benefit, because the diseases are gone. I love the overall point though.
Thanks David – important points, although I’d still contend that for the target audience, this is not only a strong piece of communication, but it introduces ideas and a perspective that is sorely lacking in the science-community driven dialogue around vaccines – of course, not including your work :).
While it’s true that the absolute level of vaccine avoidance or rejection is small, this still underpins a dominant narrative within some quarters – as does the autism-vaccines narrative. And of course, as you know, the factors underpinning risk perception are complex, varied and intertwined.
What a great video. I just discovered your blog and thought I’d introduce myself before asking a couple of questions. I am a sociologist and demographer who studies population health at Ohio State but have no expertise in risk science or vaccines.
I started looking into the data on vaccine safety in part because I was puzzled by what seemed to be a lot of absolutist claims surrounding vaccine safety that seem generally uncharacteristic of the way scientists describe bodies of research. I read the IOM 2011 report on vaccine safety as well as the Cochrane Library’s 2012 report on MMR specifically. I could write more about this or give some direct quotes to clarify but the their overall conclusions are that for 135 of the vaccine-adverse event pairs that they examined, we lack the high quality scientific research required to move away from the position that “we just don’t know if vaccine X causes adverse event Y.” (Notably, IOM does conclude that the evidence favors rejecting an MMR-autism link.)
I am just having difficulty squaring this conclusion with the dominant message offered about vaccine safety. I am not questioning the claim that the risks of vaccines, especially to average population health, are far smaller than the benefits. But is there something that I am missing in understanding what seems to be such a high level of certainty that vaccines are not associated with adverse outcomes, at least among small susceptible subgroups that have not been identified (in addition to the known immunodeficiencies that are contraindicated). Or is there a reason why the Cochrane and IOM conclusions should be discounted? Thanks very much for your help. This is mainly a matter of scientific curiosity for me. However, I have a broader professional interest in the way in which scientific conclusions about average associations between X and Y are used in making decisions about individual risk, as well as the problems with this approach in the presence of causal effect heterogeneity. Many thanks!
Many thanks for the question – rather than give an off the cuff answer, let me dig further into this.
Thanks so much!
As I was listening to this I was wondering if omission bias could be countered with a simple shift in language. If the decision not to vaccinate was presented as the action the parent would take versus vaccinating as the action would the denial rates go down?