January 22, 2015
American Belief in the Effectiveness of Vaccines
This is just depressing.
According to Christopher Ingraham on the Wonkblog over at the Washington Post:
A 2014 AP-GfK survey found that only 51 percent of Americans were confident that vaccines are safe and effective, which is similar to the proportion who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the flu vaccine probably receives the most media coverage of any vaccine, especially when it isn’t fully effective.
But the Wonkblog mentions this in the context of the current measles outbreak, which is the direct result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children.
As Ingraham writes,
But the latest CDC data illustrate the troubling resurgence of a disease that, as of 2000, had been declared eliminated. Anti-vaxxers are quite literally turning back the clock on decades of public health progress.
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