What do you
think about the theories outlined here in terms of what leads parents to be sceptical
of or against child vaccinations? Is
part of this a reaction to paternalistic and collectivist attitudes of
medical professionals that prevailed during socialism? Is the individualist approach any better? How
do you think attitudes about child vaccinations intersect with other political
attitudes? Is polarisation preventing
people from seeing this issue clearly? Is Slovakia any different from the Czech
republic in this case?
Hi. Welcome to the blog for my IB English B class at Jur Hronec High School in Bratislava, Slovakia. Below you will find links to other websites and discussion questions. My students are required to comment on one of these postings every month and also respond to each other's comments. Feel free to add your two bits, but be aware that all comments are monitored before being posted.
I have to agree with the author that there is a poor quality of debate around vaccination. Even the campaign for Covid 19 vaccine was targeted to scare people rather than to describe how does the vaccine work. Poor quality of background information given by the government about what is the vaccine made of, what does it do to our body, how was it tested and how was its safety guaranteed resulted in many conspiracy theories. The problem is not a lack of these information but their accessibility. Because if people do not deliberately search for them through reliable sources they can be easily misled by incomplete or false information. To fight against hoaxes got harder with time, because once people believed, they surrounded each other with content that confirmed their opinion, and their confirmation bias blocked all the counter arguments and evidence. That is why I think that the appeal of the government should first of all be to provide all background information and endorse a debate instead of building the campaign upon the fear from the virus, death and lockdowns. This should also be applied to the compulsory vaccination of children. Even though it is nothing new people still seem to lack all the background information and do not understand the concept of herd immunity.
ReplyDeleteAnother factor of the rise of anti-vaccination movement could be the small number of cases of the diseases. As the article states in the 1950s 10 out of every 100,000 were affected by polio and thanks to the vaccination it was “virtually eradicated in Czechoslovakia”. Today people do not see polio as a real threat so their fear from it and motivation to get their kids vaccinated decreases. However, there are countries such as Nigeria, Afghanistan and also much nearer Ukraine where polio cases occurred in the past year. If the polio vaccination rate drops another outbreak will not be out of the picture.