London Time’s headline shrieks: “Leading scientist accuses doctors of increasing fear of vaccines” When are scientists going to understand that they don’t know everything, and the world doesn’t revolve around their myopic thought patterns? Why is the primary aim of scientists to make everyone conform to their own thinking. Why do they assume that, “For most people it goes back to the primeval: ‘Well my mother had measles, I had measles, so why do I need to take the risk [of vaccinating my child]?’ What they are really saying is, ‘Can I live with myself if something went wrong?’ ” Incorrect, Prof Sir. But because Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, by virtue of his many letters, thinks he’s right, so are his solutions??!
He then goes on to point out how few in the medical profession have their annual flu shots and says, “If we can’t convince our own workforce and people who have got a medical education, then how do you expect to try to convince others — if the people who are supposed to be promoting this activity do not actually believe in it themselves,” Sir Leszek said.
Just perhaps he should be asking new questions, which are, “Are our assumptions about what parents and the medical profession think actually incorrect? Is there another paradigm here, which we are incapable of understanding, because we are blinded to the validity of them?”
But he won't because people like him don't believe in any other thoughts than their own. Just to show that he really hasn’t “got it” the quite then says:
“Sir Leszek said that medicine had been caught flatfooted repeatedly by a failure to prepare for opposition, as was shown as far back as smallpox in the 1860s.
“With every vaccine story we go through, we act as if we are surprised that somebody is actually opposed to it. We have got to accept that people are not going to be dragged to the trough and made to drink. They will oppose it and we have got to be ready to address the concerns they are raising.
“You don’t address those by trying to rubbish the people who are coming up with these views. You have to try to understand them at an individual level and then be prepared to debate them at a wider group level.”
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz joins Dr Chan, from the World Health Organisation whose defensive justifications on a recent British Medical Journal article are about equal to Prof Sir Leszek’s egocentricity.
What is interesting is that the medical profession are supposedly the cream of intelligentsia. As the hopelessly irredeemable child of a mensa mother, twenty plus years of experiencing taught me that the words “mensa” and “pillock” can often go hand in hand.
Uber-intelligent people (and not just medical ones) can often leave the rest of us gasping at the their cognitive disconnect from reality – something only obvious to the “average” amongst us. Their commonsense, empathic, and “live-and-let-live” genes appear to have gone awol.
The question is, why? Medical training? Inflated ego? Pride? Prejudice? Arrogance? Constant pharmaceutical company harassment? “Everyone else is stupid”, attitude?
Whatever.
The difficulty is in attempting to enlighten people who appear unable to comprehend what the rest of us know.
First, vaccines are a choice, which doesn’t mean, “make the choice we think you should.” Second, many vaccines are neither necessary nor desirable.
While some people’s reason for saying yes to vaccines has everything to do with them being seen as “free”, saying no to vaccines, has nothing to do with “Can I live with myself if something went wrong?”
Not all of us come from the fear or guilt-ridden school which says, “Because it can be done, it should be done.”
Some of us come from the school called, “There is a better way.”
Something incomprehensible to the Medical Mensa school of Nanny state rule.
