I posted the following comment in response to a NYT times piece about a measles outbreak in Samoa [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/world/asia/samoa-measles.html]
The Boomer and younger generations in the West have grown up with close to zero experience of infectious diseases. Not their parents (I'm one): pretty well all of us knew friends and neighbours killed by measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, polio, .... And many of us lost family to infectious diseases. We learned to fear the silent killers, who took one unawares.
But we failed to pass on that fear, because we figured that vaccinations would limit or even eliminate these diseases. We took the new-found safety for granted, not realising that what's taken for granted is simply ignored.
That's what has left an opening for the resurgence of the anti-vaxxers, who have a 200-year long history of denying the science.
It's grim, but we have to teach people to be afraid. Not a happy prospect, but I think a necessary one.
2020-01-05: Recently, I came across the phrase “shifting expectation base-line”. It referred to the fact that we tend to assume that the world has always been as it is when we experience it as children. We are unaware of how much it has changed since our parents and grandparents were children. That concept applies to the perception of infectious diseases. Our children and grandchildren live in a world with almost zero infectious disease, so they assume that’s the norm.
2020-01-15: For the record, we had our flu shots as soon as they became available this season. So far, these annual vaccinations have proteced us.
Update 2020 11 14 The covid-19 pandemic has begun to change people's perceptions. For the oldest generation it's largely deja vu, I think. It's like that for me, anyhow, but I'm not as terrified as I was of polio when I was 10 years old. For the younger generations, it's stunning. The reactions range from enraged denial to apathy. Most people accept that intense anti-infection measures are now necessary, and compliance ranges from grudging to paranoid. The 3rd wave is inundating Canada, and continues to rise in the rest of the world. The yearning for a vaccine creates false hopes: the announcement that Pfizer and BioNTech have created one that's 90% effective has prompted reactions from a sigh of relief to suspicious skepticism. The logistics of distributing a vaccine to some 7 billion people no doubt are prompting nightmares. But the ethics are worse: who should get it first, and why?
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