Vaccinating the Public from Psuedoscience: Community Immunity

Based upon modern medical science, the most efficient way to effectively protect the general public from disease is through vaccination. When it comes to facing the unknown, fear and uneasiness are natural reactions. Personal or core belief systems can have powerful influences over our perception. In some cases, decisions based from those personal belief systems can result in extremely emotional states, leaving some potentially susceptible to irrational decisions, such as parents not vaccinating their children because of some naturalistic fallacy. But, through methods and strategies, like those applied through IHS to the Native American/Alaskan Native people, we can get all the way through that gauntlet of logically fallacious, pseudoscientific terminology, that’s ultimately fueled by the fear of science. We can help educate our neighbors by providing the basic means for finding things out for themselves or simply quashing these modern myths whenever and wherever we encounter them. Maybe by helping enough parents to navigate through this information with sound scientific information and basic critical thinking, we can immunize enough belief systems from infectious pseudoscience to effectively produce the effects of herd immunity to the rest of the community.

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