As the other reply mentions, that's where the "in your face" part comes in. Many of the diseases that can be prevented by vaccines are in living memory for those countries.

On top of that, 'poorly educated' in those countries often means never having been to a proper school, never having finished basic schooling, being illiterate, or lacking access to information (be it the internet or social programs). That kind of skepticism is easier to help, because it stems from a place of actual ignorance, rather than believing oneself to be smarter than everyone else.

You do see a lot of vaccine skepticism in such countries, this study found about half of Africans view vaccines negatively.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9903367/

You don't see those, because it's on their faces. Or more accurately on our faces. I live in such country, and we kill for having our kids vaccinated. We live these diseases, so we aren't so stupid to fall for misinformation.

They're into folk medicine, but their anti-vax issues generally come from people who don't have any means of knowing better (i.e. never been to school, dropped out at a very early grade, isolated, not even literate). Typically just education and having a doctor or a local elder respectfully explain to them that the Polio shot will help prevent their child from being paralyzed for life is enough to convince them.

Meanwhile the 'educated' Westerner, to whom Polio is a third-world disease, will convince themselves that the doctor is lying for some reason, will choose to take the 75% chance of an asymptomatic infection because they don't truly appreciate how bad it can otherwise be, will use their access to a vast collection of humanity's information to cherry pick data that supports their position (most likely while also claiming to seek debate despite not intending to seriously consider opposing evidence), and if their gamble fails, will probably just blame immigrants, government or 'big pharma' for doing it.

And yet, SEA and others are still better educated than us.

Mawson et al. 2017 (two papers) – internet survey of homeschoolers recruited from anti-vaccine groups; non-random, self-reported, unverified health outcomes. Retracted by the publisher after criticism.

Hooker & Miller 2020/2021 – analysis of “control group” data also from self-selected surveys; same methodological problems.

Lyons-Weiler & Thomas 2020, 2022 – data from a single pediatric practice run by one of the authors; serious selection bias.

Joy Garner / NVKP surveys – activist-run online surveys with no verification.

Enriquez et al. 2005 – a small cross-sectional study about allergy self-reports, not about overall neurodevelopment.

Large, well-controlled population studies (Denmark, Finland, the U.S. Vaccine Safety Datalink, etc.) comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children show no increase in autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, or overall morbidity attributable to recommended vaccines.

I picked one at random (NVKP, "Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results") and, while I needed to translate it to read it, it's clear (and loud!) about not actually being a scientific study.

"We fully realize that a survey like this, even on purely scientific grounds, is flawed on all counts. The sample of children studied is far too small and unrepresentative, we didn't use control groups, and so on."

Turns out the NVKP roughly translates to "Dutch Organization for those critical towards vaccines."

I understand being skeptical about vaccines, but the skepticism needs to go both ways

"If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity." Citation very much needed for this inference.

Even if I granted every single paper's premise here. I'd still much rather have a living child with a slightly higher chance of allergies or asthma or <insert survivable condition here> than a dead child. How quickly we forget how bad things once were. Do you dispute that vaccines also accounted for 40% of the decline in infant mortality over the last 50 years? And before that, TB, Flu, and Smallpox killed uncountably many people. Vaccines are a public good and one of the best things we've ever created as a species.

Do you also have theories about autism you'd like to share with the class?

Here’s where the “bad ideas out in the open get corrected” now is tested. There are 4 really good refutations of your evidence. Outside of the unspoken “perhaps vaccines cause some measurable bad outcomes but compare then to measles. And without the herd immunity vaccinations aren’t nearly as useful” argument.

So the important question is: Are you now going to say “well, I guess i got some bad data and i have to go back and review my beliefs” or dig in?

The studies you cite are the typical ones circulated by antivaxers and are not considered credible by the medical community due to severe methodological flaws, undisclosed biases, retractions, etc.

To the contrary, high quality studies consistently show that vaccines are not linked to developmental disability or worse health outcomes.

> If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity.

Other treatments aren’t applied preventatively to the entire population which is why the risk presumably is lower.

> Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

Retracted: https://retractionwatch.com/2017/05/08/retracted-vaccine-aut...

If you edit down your list to journal articles that you know you be valid and unretracted, I will reconsider looking through it. However, journal access in general is too expensive for me to bother reading retracted articles.

Anti-vax was enough of an issue that vaccine mandates were necessary for Covid.

It also isn't convincing to be claiming that racism isn't as big in the West given all the discourse around H1Bs, Indians (the Trump base has been pretty open on this one, with comments on JD Vance's wife, the flood of anti-Indian racism on social media, and recently the joy taken in attempting to interfere with Indians forced to fly back to the US in a hurry due to the lack of clarity on the H1B thing), how ICE is identifying illegals, a senator openly questioning the citizenship of a brown mayoral candidate and so on.

I agree that denying something is the easiest way to convince people of the opposite, but it's also understandable when social media companies decide to censor advice from well known individuals that people should do potentially harmful things like consume horse dewormer to deal with Covid. Basically, it's complicated, though I would prefer to lean towards not censoring such opinions.