I do not deal in anti-vax conspiracy theories.
You know I am not against all vaccines per se. In my opinion no one should give vaccines to babies under one year old, because the reaction to the onslaught of ingredients needs to be safely processed by a healthy immune system, which isn’t there until that time, and possibly not even at age one, but at least waiting one year, checking for signs of illness, keeping up with genetics research, and staggering the shots, getting single illness vaccines over multi illness vaccines, asking the doctor to open a new multi dose bottle or seeing that it is almost full, MINIMIZES THE RISK of permanent neurological damage.
How can you critique my opinion thus as anything but scientifically cautious? Yet you call me a conspiracist. Isn’t that just what leftists do, polarizing and mocking people who disagree? Babies’ health shouldn’t be left to “faith in a government agency.” Parents should have full freedom to study and learn the best, safest choices. Not forced due to agencies and corporations with financial or political biases.
Many of the anti-vax conspiracy sites appeal to people by putting a scientific veneer over their misinformation and conspiracies. They appeal to people by claiming to "reveal" information that is "withheld" by the government. They have developed a very sophisticated propaganda designed to appeal to people who already have a distrust of authority or government. And so their target audience believes that by consulting these anti-vax sites, they are getting "real" information that is being suppressed. Etc. Etc.
If you want real information, you have to really analyze the quality of the material posted on the site. Is it plausible? Can the claim be easily refuted? For example, anti-vax conspiracy sites love to promote the notion that vaccines are not tested, that people who receive vaccines are guinea pigs in some dark conspiracy to conduct unethical experimentation. Yet it is not difficult to find the requirements for FDA approval of vaccines, which are treated just like every other FDA approved drug. It takes a minimum of ten years to bring a vaccine from initial phase I clinical trials through to FDA approval--and that's only if the stars align just right. In reality, the process towards FDA approval is long and rocky; it can take decades.
Another hallmark of anti-vax conspiracy sites is that they appeal directly to emotion, not fact. For example, the diatribe about babies being injected with adjuvanted vaccines is nothing but emotion. The target audience for such fear-mongering is people who have no idea how the immune system works and no idea about the role of adjuvants. The majority of adverse reactions to vaccines occur because of the immune response to the antigen. [A logical assumption is that if a person's immune response to a vaccine is so strong as to cause significant inflammation at the injection site, that an infection with the pathogen the vaccine protects against would be extremely debilitating and potentially lethal.] Many of the remaining adverse reactions are due to suboptimal injection techniques, which have to be addressed through making sure the personnel administering vaccines are properly trained.
Last, the "scientific evidence" that anti-vax conspiracy sites love to present in support of their conspiracies is not even remotely scientific. One example of that is the claim that measles was disappearing all by itself before the vaccine was widely used. As proof, they'll present a graph that shows how measles deaths were declining. But they don't give any context. They don't mention that the decrease in deaths is because of improved hospital practices--for example, the practices of providing IV fluid support and keeping the patient in an aseptic environment to prevent secondary bacterial infections do prevent many (but not all) measles deaths. They don't tell you that without a vaccine, measles is one of the most contagious diseases known, and that a serious measles epidemic or pandemic could easily overwhelm the medical system to the point that many infected people would not receive the high level of care needed to reduce mortality.
Certainly, it is prudent to inform yourself. There are many sources of legitimate information. You can look up the status of vaccines in clinical trials and see how the trials are conducted at the site www.clinicaltrials.gov. You can research the medical literature on any vaccine you want at www.pubmed.gov. That's where you'll find the original research described. Or you can consult the CDC website for good information that is directed towards lay people who are not scientifically educated (but are still assumed to be reasonably intelligent). And so on. I would avoid anything connected to Barbara Loe Fisher, Robert Kennedy Jr., Jenny McCarthy, and other rabid anti-vaxxers, as well as web-sites like whale.to, mercola, and so on. [Interestingly, I tried to search for anti-vax websites and found, instead, mostly results telling how anti-vax websites seek to deceive. That's a significant change from even a couple of years ago, when my search results would have been populated with anti-vax conspiracy sites. And here's an interesting blog from a young mother who was initially swayed by anti-vax conspiracy mongering but did her own research and eventually let the facts inform her opinion.]