Anti-vaxxers and Authority
As we read in Steven Epstein’s article, it is common for the public to hold an opinion on developments in science, especially those that interact with politics and personal lives of citizens. In the past few decades this has been abundantly true with the debate surrounding vaccines and their effects. While it is widely accepted by the scientific community that vaccines are a positive force with few to no negative effects, there is a growing public sentiment that vaccines can cause developmental problems in children. Thankfully, this has remained a relatively fringe idea and has seen significant backlash in the media as of late, but even its small sphere of influence has had significant effects on the population, causing occasional outbreaks of measles in youths.
The growth of the negative perception surrounding vaccines can mostly be attributed to the support of popular authority figures and a general distrust of sciences that are seen as experimental. It is easy to blame celebrities for perpetuating this lie, but in fact it can more likely be attributed to the echo chamber of online blogs and other social media where radical views can be maintained through a flood of cherry picked information or misinformation.
As Joan H. Fujimura’s article asserts, in science, especially popular science, reigning theories and ideas are successful due to authority and subjectivity. The growth of online resources have fractured authorial figures on science and contributed to this small movement, along with others, and may pose an issue for future scientific advancement.
