Worries About Autism Link Still Hang Over Vaccines : Shots - Health Blog : NPR
We wondered if people’s opinions about vaccines had changed in the last five years. Nearly a quarter said they had. In that group, 59 percent said their opinions had become less favorable. A little more than a third said their opinions had gotten better.
How do the results square with the scientific evidence supporting vaccine safety and effectiveness and a steady campaign by doctors and public health officials to boost confidence? “The human mind has a hard time accepting things that didn’t happen versus things that could happen,” Dr. Raymond Fabius, chief medical officer at Thomson Reuters, tells Shots. “Vaccines get devalued because of their great effectiveness.”
Older people still remember when polio was a much bigger worry than cancer, he says. Now, in this country, many people have never seen the toll polio and other infectious diseases took before widespread vaccination.
