Matching Tracksuits

How can you talk to someone who doesn’t accept facts? How can you have a discussion with someone who takes expert opinion with the same degree of credibility that she takes television advertisements?

How do you talk to an anti-vaxxer? How do you talk to a climate-change denier? How do you talk to a creationist?

In all three examples, the jury is in: vaccines work; the climate is changing due to human activity; evolution happened (and is happening). We don’t have to understand how all these things work in order to accept them. I don’t understand how my anti-lock braking system or my cell phone touch screen works but I use them.

Here’s an exchange between an anti-vaxxer and me when I posted this video to social media.

The anti-vaxxer, a neighbor whose kids play with my kids, replied,

There has been no confirmed case of polio since the 70’s. Why would I have my children vaccinated against a disease that no longer exists?

There is a bit of ignorance as well as self-centeredness in this response: there have been confirmed cases (the ignorance) but just in third-world countries (the self-centeredness: who cares about them?). I replied diplomatically:

Polio still exists in the third world, but you’re right about the States: no confirmed cases since 1979. The intent of this post is more about vaccines in general: why haven’t we had polio in the US in almost forty years? The answer is simple: vaccinations.

There’s not a lot of debate among researchers, doctors, and epidemiologists regarding this: vaccines have virtually eliminated polio. Period. The CDC confirms this; the WHO confirms this; numerous university research facilities confirm this. Her response was telling:

I don’t buy it. 90% of the cases were misdiagnosed (example: FDR actually had GBS, not polio). And, you can look a records [sic] that show that the numbers of cases were already declining before the vaccine was put into play.

With those four words, “I don’t buy it,” she discounts thousands, perhaps millions, of man-hours of research, analysis, and thinking by people that have forgotten more about disease and its spread than she and I know collectively. She exemplifies a kind of conspiracy-based thinking that discounts experts and authority on a seeming whim.

What do you say to someone like this? How can you continue such a conversation? In short, I’m not sure it’s possible. My response was simple: I didn’t respond. I wanted to, though. I wanted to ask where in the world she got this 90% statistic.

I wanted to ask how she had that information about the decline of polio prior to the discovery of the vaccine. I wanted to ask her if she had peer-reviewed articles to substantiate her position. But it’s clear that she doesn’t see any value in this type of peer-review authority.

We don’t share a common definition of reality, so how can meaningful dialogue occur?