The Media’s Vaccine Hesitancy
This spring, I took my daughter to the pediatrician for her 2-month checkup. It was a momentous visit, because she would finally receive the first batch of vaccines that could prove critical for her health and safety.
Before the nurse pulled out a syringe, though, she started with a preamble—a gentle, seemingly repeated case for why the shots were safe and why we shouldn’t worry. At some point, we stopped her. We’re very comfortable with our child getting vaccinated, we told her. You don’t need to convince us.
It was clear that she had given that speech hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times to parents who needed to hear it and parents who didn’t. That is the position pediatric medicine has been forcibly pushed into over the past decade, or even longer—having to defend established science to the public because of the rampant mis-and-disinformation poisoning the public discourse.
That is also the kind of posture the press should have taken this week when Donald Trump signed an executive order that aims to drastically reshape the childhood vaccine schedule. Unfortunately, much of the news media…
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