Parents bear the responsibility of making life-shaping decisions in issues such as education and healthcare for their children. The growing skepticism against vaccines and the healthcare industry is worrying because it can potentially cause preventable deaths. In this paper, I will be responding to Sarah Pope’s entry in The Healthy Home Economist where she argued against vaccines. Pope established her family’s medical background to show that her claims are not unfounded. It is ironic that she used this to reel the reader to trust her because her background makes her a legitimate source of information, when in her previous paragraph she urged readers to realize that doctors can make mistakes and are blindly conveying information from the
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However she failed to consider the converse: there are no undos of not vaccinating children and them falling very sick to chronic diseases. Building up on Pope’s point on the fragility of babies’ immune systems, this presents itself as a strong reason to vaccinate. At such an early stage in life, babies have not developed strong immunities and are more vulnerable to diseases such as chickenpox and MMR. Haelle (2015) reported the lack of proof that spacing out vaccines is safer for babies. The recommended schedule was created with intentionality for the greatest protection from harmful diseases from well-researched sources such as the CDC (Haelle, 2015). The author continued defending her anti-vaccine stance based on her personal experience with vaccinated and unvaccinated …show more content…
Pope would increase her credibility as an author if she analyzed both sides of the debate which would transfer to the legitimacy of the arguments she makes.
#fallacy: A form of the red herring fallacy, Pope uses the appeal to authority argument. Just because the information she propagates comes from positions of authority in the medical realm, then her arguments are valid.
#emotion: It was not a far stretch to arrive at the anti-vaccine conclusion due to her personal experience. She could be biased towards anti-vaccine sentiments because she grew up surrounded by the sense of skepticism of vaccines and modern medicine to begin with.
#attentionalbias: Pope highlights this portion of her article by changing the font color. This indicates to the reader that this paragraph is important (Bodenhausen & Hugenberg, 2009).
#perceptualbias: Pope used a top-down approach because based on her belief of harmful additives in vaccines, she expected unvaccinated children to be just as healthy, if not healthier, than vaccinated children. This expectation hindered her from looking at the situation objectively (Bodenhausen & Hugenberg,
However she failed to consider the converse: there are no undos of not vaccinating children and them falling very sick to chronic diseases. Building up on Pope’s point on the fragility of babies’ immune systems, this presents itself as a strong reason to vaccinate. At such an early stage in life, babies have not developed strong immunities and are more vulnerable to diseases such as chickenpox and MMR. Haelle (2015) reported the lack of proof that spacing out vaccines is safer for babies. The recommended schedule was created with intentionality for the greatest protection from harmful diseases from well-researched sources such as the CDC (Haelle, 2015). The author continued defending her anti-vaccine stance based on her personal experience with vaccinated and unvaccinated …show more content…
Pope would increase her credibility as an author if she analyzed both sides of the debate which would transfer to the legitimacy of the arguments she makes.
#fallacy: A form of the red herring fallacy, Pope uses the appeal to authority argument. Just because the information she propagates comes from positions of authority in the medical realm, then her arguments are valid.
#emotion: It was not a far stretch to arrive at the anti-vaccine conclusion due to her personal experience. She could be biased towards anti-vaccine sentiments because she grew up surrounded by the sense of skepticism of vaccines and modern medicine to begin with.
#attentionalbias: Pope highlights this portion of her article by changing the font color. This indicates to the reader that this paragraph is important (Bodenhausen & Hugenberg, 2009).
#perceptualbias: Pope used a top-down approach because based on her belief of harmful additives in vaccines, she expected unvaccinated children to be just as healthy, if not healthier, than vaccinated children. This expectation hindered her from looking at the situation objectively (Bodenhausen & Hugenberg,