FN: I also am surprised how many people on this forum get flu shots for themselves and kids. I don't know anyone that does and everyone is a college educated professional. Shingles can be horrible-blindness if you get it in your eye, scars, pain, etc. But if you are allergic to certain meds you can't get the shingles vaccine. For instance, I am allergic to neomycin so can't get it.
Why are you surprised? Even if you were ignorant of the facts before, they have been posted multiple times in this thread already. It boggles my mind when people are presented with evidence and still deny it.
I also know many college educated professionals (some are legitimately intelligent people) that believe in magic and ghosts, and don't believe in things like vaccines and evolution. They have completely compartmentalized some beliefs and can't be swayed with things like facts or evidence.
This is actually an interesting phenomenon that occurs in public health, but many people outside the field do not notice. While in general we do see better overall health behaviors such as diet, exercise, not smoking, family planning, etc in more well educated and affluent populations, there are some risky behaviors that these seemingly healthier groups are particularly prone to. Vaccine avoidance, homebirth, and peer to peer milk sharing (using unscreened, unregulated human milk from strangers to feed infants instead of infant formula) come to mind. What kind of well educated, well off woman would purposefully choose to have an unassisted birth at home, far from any medical care, with only her graphic designer husband around to help? Who the hell in their right mind would feed unscreened body fluids from a stranger on the internet to their vulnerable newborn? Anyone with half a brain knows that childbirth can be dangerous, and that body fluids can contain diseases and dangerous bacteria right? Well it turns out, there are a lot of well educated women making these extremely questionable decisions right now as I type this – and they also tend to be the ones who are also suspicious of vaccinations too.
This happens because these people are essentially over-under educated. Meaning, they are educated and analytical enough to want to seek out information and form their own health opinions (generally a good thing!) but not educated enough on the specific topic to actually make the correct decision. Essentially, they know enough to form a nuanced opinion, but not enough to appropriately navigate that nuance to the healthiest choice. Their partial knowledge on the subject, which they usually don't realize is incomplete or lacking, leads them astray. To add insult to injury, many of us are also harmed by our own health privilege. How many people today have witnessed a child die from diphtheria or witness a baby injured in a difficult birth? Very very few. As a result, too few of us have internalized the message that these things are extremely dangerous in the way people used to. Sure, we know about the dangers intellectually, but we do not feel the fear or fully comprehend the risk because we have been protected from actually witnessing and experiencing the consequences. Watch one baby die from pertussis and you won't need to be convinced that it is a BFD, regardless of what anyone tells you. Read about the dangers of pertussis and then turn around and watch an antivaxxer documentary and well, you aren't so sure.
On the other hand, less educated people seem more likely to just default to whatever the authority figure (doctor, government agency, etc) tells them to do. That’s how we end up with very successful and intelligent but surprisingly ignorant BA, MA, and PhD holders running around not vaccinating their kids and insisting that giving birth without medical assistance is perfectly safe. It also means these people are the hardest to convince otherwise, because they tend to be sure that they are correct given the fact that they perceive themselves to be well informed on the topic (when in actuality they are most certainly not).
Here’s an example of how this can work out related to vaccines:
Well educated parents who lean green/crunchy are a little anxious about vaccinating their precious baby, so they naturally set out on a quest to learn all about it. They learn about vaccines, their importance and general safety, but also the very rare but serious effects that have been documented in a very small number of children. They also learn about herd immunity and learn that the likelihood of their baby being exposed to measles in the US is quite low due to this phenomenon. So far, things are going well – they are far more informed than a parent who just gets the vaxx because the doctor says so, or simply refuses it due to religious belief. So where do they go wrong? Well at this point their analysis often stops prematurely, even though they do not realize it. They think they have enough information to make a decision. As a result, they take the nuanced, but incorrect, opinion that it is safe to not vaccinate their kid due to the existing herd immunity in the US. Why risk being one of those rare people who gets bad side effects if herd immunity will most likely protect the baby anyway? But they come to this incorrect conclusion because they are only partially informed, not truly well informed. 2 key pieces have been left out of their analysis: relative risk, and the fact that local community/exposure is critical to herd immunity for a given individual. Herd immunity is dramatically compromised in certain progressive, liberal crunchy communities where parents are more likely to avoid vaccines. So a mom might think she is getting the benefit of herd immunity (because of her partial understanding of the subject) without realizing that her very involvement in her holistic moms group, or living in a very progressive city/town, actually means the herd immunity around her child is drastically compromised. In this way, her partial and incomplete knowledge of herd immunity actually hurts her decision making, not helps her. Same with relative risk – her partial knowledge of side effects and risk makes her believe that the risk of not vaccinating is on par, or possibly even less risky, than the risk of getting the vaccine. She doesn’t understand the relative risk of the two decisions because she doesn't have all the information.
The truth is, it takes a lot of time, effort, skill, and prior knowledge to do a thorough risk/benefit analysis of health related decisions, and even the smartest and most educated people can easily go astray if they don't know the health field well enough. It's really too bad and very alarming because now we are seeing problems that are completely unnecessary in today's day and age - babies starving because moms refuse infant formula, brain damaged children from homebirths gone wrong, and resurgences of deadly illnesses.
