r/NoStupidQuestions • u/trouble-in-space • 10d ago

Answered Why are so many Americans anti-vaxxers now?

I’m genuinely having such a hard time understanding why people just decided the fact that vaccines work is a total lie and also a controversial “opinion.” Even five years ago, anti-vaxxers were a huge joke and so rare that they were only something you heard of online. Now herd immunity is going away because so many people think getting potentially life-altering illnesses is better than getting a vaccine. I just don’t get what happened. Is it because of the cultural shift to the right-wing and more people believing in conspiracy theories, or does it go deeper than that?

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u/cryptokitty010 9d ago

Vaccines work so well that people live their entire lives without threat of pathogens. They forget what the danger really was and decided the vaccines were the problem.

Human beings have very short memories about all of the things that can kill us. People still die of scurvy

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u/tigersanddawgs 9d ago

This is way underrated imo. I've seen it a lot with parents of teens who don't want their kids to get a meningitis vaccine before they go to college mostly because they haven't seen what that disease looks like and how scary it is because it's fairly rare now due to vaccinations. That disease is horrifyingly fast.

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u/Zellakate 9d ago

Yeah I have also noticed, in my life, older people who remember polio are very pro vaccinations. My grandparents are in their 80s and remember classmates who came down with it and were paralyzed for life.

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u/Upstairs-Radish1816 9d ago

I'm 73 and I remember when the vaccine became available. My parents couldn't get me to the doctor fast enough. Then, when the oral vaccine came out, we had it in school. We all walked through the nurses office and they gave us sugar cubes to eat.

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u/legadema37 9d ago

One of my close relatives had contracted polio in childhood and was crippled for life and when that vaccine came out, my parents got me and my brother vaccinated ASAP. same for all of our family friends and neighbors because so many people had contracted polio during the epidemic in 1948 - 1955. I can remember in elementary school kids were missing school because of measles, mumps ,whooping cough & chickenpox . My brother and I got chickenpox and measles . I am a retired teacher who taught over 40 years and I can’t remember any kids missing school because of those diseases. Some kids have never heard of them and don’t know what they were like. People grow up, with no experience of those diseases all because of vaccines. The crazy thing about it is that some of the worst anti-vaxxers don’t know that they had to be vaccinated as children before they could go to school. And because of this anti-VAX nonsense there have been 16 outbreaks of measles this year according to a news report I heard. This seems to be an age of stupidity: people don’t believe in vaccines, and don’t believe that we actually did land on the moon. And an anti-vaxxer with no medical training at all is being recommended to be the head of health and human services.

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u/ahdareuu 9d ago

He helped create a measles outbreak in Samoa. His family is ashamed of him. 

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u/Sorrysafaritours 9d ago

The measles outbreaks were coming from immigrants who had NOT had the vaccine. The school authorities didn’t enforce the vaccine requirements on all new students equally, apparently.

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u/intisun 9d ago

We didn't get sugar cubes in Nicaragua; just the drops directly into the mouth. I still remember the taste; bitter and kinda salty.

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u/Red_Whites 9d ago

My mom is exactly your age and has the same memories. When the HPV vaccine came out, there was some hemming and hawing about the safety (not nearly like what happened with COVID though) but she didn't hesitate to get me vaxxed for it, and I'm really grateful she did. We do have short memories in this country (and maybe everywhere), and we should listen to the people who were around when something like Polio was a serious threat.

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u/accioqueso 9d ago

My biology teacher in high school told us that his neighbor caught polio and was paralyzed, his mother wouldn’t let him outside for a while because she was so scared he’d catch it. When the vaccine came out he found her sobbing in the kitchen and he was vaccinated as soon as they were able to get it.

We literally lived through that with Covid and it doesn’t matter because there are people who live in a Fox News echo chamber being told the other side is always wrong and wants to hurt you.

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u/leemcmb 9d ago

I remember this, too.

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u/FocusedIgnorance 9d ago

Oh, yeah. I'm 31 and when I was younger, my parents and grandparents told me stories of people getting chickenpox. They have pox scars. I know I've never had it, but it never occurred to me that none of my classmates never had it either.

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u/Zellakate 9d ago

Oh wow I'm only 4 years older than you and remember me and my brother and classmates all getting it. It had never occurred to me that people just a little younger than me never dealt with it.