Anti-Vaxxers Quotes

“When opposition to vaccination becomes attached to a person’s identity and values, contradictory information can feel like an attack on that identity and those values.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The very presence of those who oppose vaccination are in that way a testament the effectiveness of vaccines.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Human life has always been stalked by disease. For bacteria, viruses, and parasites, our bodies and our cells are perfect incubators. Every life saved and every quantum of suffering avoided by a vaccine is the legacy of all the physicians and scientists who have ever devoted themselves to developing or disseminating these life-saving technologies. The anti-vaccination movement has worked its way into the public discourse, motivated by compassion and distrust of authority, experts, corporations, and governments.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Doing your own research isn’t a bad thing, so long as you use good sources.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Rather than being low-information parents, these are parents who are, if anything, less selective in choosing the sources they get information from. Rather than using information arrived at through the scientific method, they have also incorporated information from websites, alternative health practitioners, and religious leaders.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Undervaccinated children are likely to be children whose parents want them to receive health care but cannot afford it, whereas unvaccinated children are likely to be children of parents with vaccine doubt. Indeed, the strongest predictors of vaccine exemptions in California are median household income, higher percentage of white race in the population, and private schools.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. —Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The religions of the world are diverse, representing many different supernatural explanations for the nature of reality, beliefs, and practices, so it is difficult to make blanket statements about whether a religious objection to vaccination can ever accurately reflect a person’s religious beliefs. However, the majority of world religions don’t hold an objection to vaccination as actual official belief. Because many states allow for religious exemptions to vaccination, in effect, religious belief becomes a convenient scapegoat for vaccine objections.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Hundreds of millions of tweets are posted daily, and hundreds of millions of people use social-media platforms. Like it or not, these platforms have become the de facto means by which most nonscientists receive and access information about scientific discoveries. Internet communication can even lead to positive outcomes. Use of the internet increases positive attitudes about science overall, and access to science blogs can help address knowledge gaps across social classes.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“In many ways science has not yet caught up to social media in its ability to disseminate information. Many scientists prefer traditional media sources. Our means of communicating scientific information are still mostly modeled after means of communication that are now largely dead.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The word meme was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to draw an analogy between how genes can propagate in populations by evolution and how small units of ideas can propagate between people. Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes. (Richard Dawkins, according to Merriam-Webster)”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“… as of 2008 over half of the search results returned for “vaccine safety” and “vaccine danger” were inaccurate. About one-quarter of these websites aspire to claims of authority by imitating those of official organizations or by citing dubious literature, and many frame vaccination as a “debate” occurring within the medical community and offer “unbiased” information.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“On the social-media platform Twitter, fake-news stories propagate “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly” than true stories. False stories reached more people, jumped from more users, had greater success going viral, and were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than were true stories. Those who primarily consume news online are more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is a concern because 80 percent of internet users search for health information online.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Ableism has been defined as “the term used to describe the discrimination against and the exclusion of individuals with physical and mental disabilities from full participation and opportunity within society’s systems and activities.” Ableism is a useful lens through which to examine much of the rhetoric generated by the anti-vaccine movement as it pertains to autism.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Rarely do issues have “two sides” of equal scientific merit that deserve equal representation. Credentials alone mean little. Those representing themselves as scientists or physicians may well have doctorates, but they may also be speaking well outside their areas of expertise. The story of the little guy going up against an evil corporation may make for a compelling (and well-worn) narrative, but often the little guy is working with bad science.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Journalists fill very different social roles than those of scientists, and the press serves different roles than those of scientific institutions. Scientists and research institutions have motivations for communicating with the public that only partly overlap with those of journalists. From a scientist’s perspective, the function of media ought to be to disseminate scientific results accurately and in proportion to the strength of the evidence they have produced…
Journalists, on the other hand, work to avoid the appearance of working for a “special interest.” The news media aim to entertain; warn of dangers and failures; and report, explain, or comment on events. Preventing disease is not one of these goals…
Although desiring to only present factual information, a journalist with a deadline to deliver a story before the publication of a newspaper or the airing of television program may simply not have enough time to “get it right” because they interviewed the wrong people, missed important features, or were not able to follow up on sources. Long-form investigative journalism, such as Deer’s investigation of Wakefield’s conflicts of interest, can slowly fill these gaps.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“The diagnosis of autism increased from 1988 to 1999, by seven times, but the vaccination rate had remained relatively stable at about 95 percent.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“In the past, the number of children diagnosed was lower. The change is mostly likely due to an improved definition and a better understanding of autism; greater access to resources for parents of autistic children, leading more to seek diagnosis; and wider access to medical care.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“Legal rulings have no bearing on scientific and medical truth. Like scientists, legal professionals are interested in finding the truth (well, at least sometimes). However, the means that the legal profession uses to arrive at decisions are different from those used in science.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“...statistics can be deployed badly, or in bad faith. The often complex-looking equations and symbols of statistics can be used to communicate quickly and succinctly between those with statistical training, and they can be used to confuse, befuddle, and bully into belief those without.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

“We will see in a later chapter that religious exemptions are rarely based on the teachings of any religion and often invite parents to lie.”
― Jonathan M. Berman, Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement