Ask Lemmy

If you think there are no anti-vaxxers in your country, you've got another thing coming.

Many of the anti-vax groups at the center of outbreaks are members of religious minorities. Menanites, Amish, and Hasidic Jews. The reason it's become more of a problem is that some upper middle class families have joined in and created more unvaccinated pockets in communities in the last decade.

For decades the conservative movement in the US has fostered a distrust in government and it has permeated just about everything.

Edit: I would also like to point out that these communities exist in the US because their ancestors likely fled religious oppression in YOUR country. Assuming you live anywhere in Europe there's a high chance that is true.

Lack of education?

Probably the same reason Europeans drink and smoke too tbh

The risk seems worth it. Either because the see it as lower than it is or that the loss of life less valuable than others see it.

We also have a chronic disposition toward optimism. You know “the American dream” and all that.

So a disease with a 10% mortality rate has a 90% survival rate. And 90% is bigger than 50%, so when you factor in chronic optimism it’s basically a 100% survival rate in our brains.

I think many of us don't realize that there's a better option. As in, this is just the way it is. Many who do learn there are alternatives then fall to propaganda about how the alternatives are worse or communist, etc.

Because we are so far removed from poor conditions that some of us don't even think they exist. And since they've never seen it, misinformation can just slide right in.

we have a domestic cult that doesn't listen to anything outside of the cult. for the people not in the cult, most are not against medicine and other modern things. some of us are actual scientists and feel like we just live here.

Because, in spite (or perhaps because of) the 'rough individualist' propaganda, most Americans have a strong sense of powerlessness and that all they can do is keep their head down and hope for the best. It veers into some really absurdist fatalism at times.

t. leftist American from a conservative area who still keeps tabs on family

People only care about narratives, and a side effect of having a scientific/naturalistic worldview is that things like disease become narratively inert.

People used to care a lot more about diseases when they could be given narrative causes like witchcraft or demons.

Questions like this seem stupid, or they just need to be phrased in a more reasonable way.