Most Americans would tell you they want to know the truth, yet the actions of many Americans seem to contradict this. We live in a world where some mothers would rather listen to celebrities rather than scientists on the matter of whether or not vaccines are linked to autism. A world where even though we can get the facts from a reputable source from a simple Google search, we would rather just continue to go with an old myth that someone once told us. A world where we will flat out ignore the warnings from nearly every scientist that climate change is real and we might be responsible because some people without any real insight on the matter said that climate change was a myth. We have all the facts told to us by experts and yet we decide that we would rather go with the pseudoscientific reports by people who don’t actually know anything about the subject, or in the case of autism and vaccines, was found to have lied about some of the data he gathered.
With the case of vaccines and autism, the people who refuse to believe that there is no real link between the two got information from a scientist who published false findings and was even called out for this and disproven by other scientists. Yet, even after his findings were exposed as false, people continued to believe this and many, including some celebrities, continued to spread the myth that there was a link, even after many other qualified scientists assured us that there was no link. So now not only do we have kids not being vaccinated, because their crazy parents believe that they will get autism, but we now run the risk of seeing things like polio and whooping cough coming back because of the lack of vaccination.
Another thing that we seem to ignore is climate change. We hear from most scientists that the Earth’s temperature has risen, the polar ice caps have melted some and that it has a lot to do with the large amounts of carbon dioxide that have become trapped in the atmosphere over the past few centuries, since we first began burning coal. We hear all of this all the time, yet many people will still tell you that global warming or climate change is a myth. To me this one is even more of a blatant dismissal of the facts, because a lot of this information comes straight from empirical evidence. In other words, we can just observe it and notice it.
These aren’t the only facts that are being ignored, they are just a couple that I could think of off of the top of my head. But these two are some of the more important facts. If we continue to ignore the fact that the link between autism and vaccines is a myth, we are going to start seeing more and more kids getting polio again, a disease that was essentially wiped out by vaccines decades ago. If we continue to ignore the fact that climate change is real and that we are likely the one’s responsible for much of it, we will never be able to do anything to prevent it or slow it down. My point is that we have the facts, let’s start using them instead of just going with what we heard was true or what we think is true.
