Jaded wrote:
How do they explain both my kids being on the spectrum when they weren't vaccinated one iota? Yeah, that.
They don't even have an explanation for the fact that the problem has continued to get worse even though the vaccines have changed!
Unfortunately, we've got two schools of thought that are at work here.
1) "We have to do something. This is something. Therefore we have to do it." The suggestion that we shouldn't do something specific is automatically equated in both their minds and their rheotric to the suggestion that we should do nothing. Doing something ineffective, or even counterproductive, is considered to be better than not doing anything at all, even when the solution creates an host of new problems. Take, for example, Prohibition in the United States.
John D. Rockefeller wrote:
When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.
Most of this was apparent within a year or two of the 18th amendment and the Volstead act, and yet it took over 13 years for them to repeal Prohibition.
2) A general distrust of any statement by Authority, no matter how self-evident. Regardless of your opinion of the actual historicity involved, it is still significant to note that, by and large, nobody really believes that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Hell, if George W. Bush went out on April Fool's Day and announced that he wanted to dispel the rumours that he was actually a simian-lizard hybrid developed by Nikolai Tesla to protect the world from an invasion of aliens led by Paris Hilton's purse-dog, you'd have websites up in three hours about the purse-dog invasion and how the government would be hiding it from us.
So when these people hear opposition, they close their ears to reason. I imagine that there are one or two of them who just want somebody to sue and don't care about the facts, and they probably have a lot to do with it. There are certainly enough "wedge issues" being pushed by people with their own agendas but perpetuated by the people they've suckered. But it's very possible that all of these people really believe that there is a link, despite the fact that they aren't qualified to make that judgment.
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"And if I had the choice, I'd take the voice I got, 'cause it was hard to find..."
--Johnette Napolitano