"One popular talking point we see a lot in the mainstream media is that "anti-vaxxers" believe in "conspiracy theories" about vaccines, as though some grand conspiracy was required to explain how basically the entire medical establishment could get it wrong about vaccines.
How could so many pediatricians, for example, be wrong when they tell parents that vaccines are "safe and effective" and necessary for their children? It's not as though all these doctors are in on some conspiracy to deceive their patients!
This fallacious ad hominem argument against critics of public vaccine policy is a lazy and intellectually dishonest means of addressing parents' legitimate concerns.
It's actually not hard at all to answer the question of how most doctors could be wrong. After all, it's not as though the medical establishment hasn't been proven wrong before! On the contrary, the idea that the medical establishment is somehow infallible is downright ludicrous, given its history of being wrong constantly on matters of life-or-death importance.
Furthermore, doctors can hardly practice medicine at all these days as they see fit. They are strictly confined due to government intervention in the market in the "care" they provide to patients.
Anecdotally, I've had my share of less-than-useless doctors who were totally ignorant about advances in medical science and just went on practicing the way they'd been taught in medical school and following "standard of care" regardless of what science actually has to say about it. Even the good doctors who are open-minded and make an effort to keep up with the science are strictly limited.
For example, the one decent primacy care physician I've had retired because, as he told me, he could no longer practice medicine according to his own judgement. He told me about another elderly female patient of his who was on a certain medication that had been on the market a long time and had a good safety record and was effective for her. But he was being dictated to under regulatory red tape so that he could no longer prescribe that drug for her, but must instead prescribe another, newer drug that had no long-term track record of safety and which might not be as effective for her.
There is practically no doctor-patient relationship anymore. Instead, doctors -- certainly including pediatricians --are dictated to about how to conduct their trade. The dictats come from government as well as trade organizations like the industry-funded American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
In early 2017, the AAP issued a press release claiming that vaccines prevent cancer, that the hypothesis that vaccines can cause autism has been scientifically disproven, and that the claim that vaccines administered according to the CDC's routine childhood schedule is contributing to the ill-health of the childhood population has been scientifically disproven.
So I contacted the organization to request the studies upon which those claims were based.
The AAP first tried and failed to produce any such studies, and then, when pressed further to support their bold claims with science, they refused.
I documented my correspondence with the AAP in a 2017 article titled "American Academy of Pediatrics Refuses to Back Vaccine Claims with Science". It's among the most popular articles I've ever published on my website. If you've never read it, you'll want to be sure to do so, and if you have, it might be worth revisiting". – Jeremy R. Hammond.
American Academy of Pediatrics Refuses to Back Vaccine Claims with Science
When asked whether it could provide studies to support specific claims it made about vaccine safety, the American Academy of Pediatrics ultimately declined..
Read the article with referenced links here;
https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2017/03/28/american-academy-of-pediatrics-refuses-to-back-vaccine-claims-with-science/
Dogma v Science.
