How the anti-vaccine movement crept into the mainstream

> “The more they dig into it being about freedom, the more susceptible they become the to the theories,” said Dave Gorski, a Michigan physician who has tracked the anti-vaccine movement for two decades. “Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.”

Medicine uses a lot of pseudoscience in marketing treatments: stents for stable heart patients, Premarin (derived from horse urine) for menopause... knee surgeries that are no better than placebo [0]... Chemotherapy as treatment for cancer, even though Otto Warburg determined cancer is a metabolic problem in the 1940’s... there was an article on medium by a doctor who challenged his profession’s obsession with bariatric surgery, if I find the link when I get home I’ll post it in a follow up comment.

I think the stories of adult baseball players from Central America catching chicken pox are interesting. Why doesn’t chicken pox spread in Central America? Is there a connection to sunlight? Vitamin D? Just like we have a flu season, I bet there’s a chicken pox season too... People in northern latitudes get Winter Sickness when the sun goes away for the winter, on account of the lower level of sunlight (due to vitamin D, and how red light refreshes cytochrome c oxidase, the copper enzyme in our mitochondria).

I had a mild case of chicken pox. Only had it once. I think doctors vaccinate against chicken pox for the convenience of parents and day care centers, not because children actually need to be protected against this particular viral infection. Yes, some children have bad cases of chicken pox, but shouldn’t science be employed to figure out why some children have mild cases of chicken pox, while others have severe cases?

Tetanus vaccination is very useful. Tetanus vaccines are good for about 10 years, iirc. Vaccination advocates ought to lead with tetanus, because tetanus infections are random, miserable, and often fatal, whereas measles is inevitable and mostly survivable.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/health/features/stories/2015/03/25/42... - a study about arthroscopic knee surgery being no better than placebo surgery first hit the news around 2002, it seems, but this link is more recent.