My “Conversation” With Consumer Watchdog Executive Director Carmen Balber About Vaccine Safety
By STEVE KIRSCH
Balber is pro-vaccine. She doesn’t care that there isn’t any scientific evidence supporting her belief that vaccinated kids are better off. It just doesn’t matter.
Consumer Watchdog Executive Director Carmen Balber believes that the safety of vaccines cannot be challenged. She’s not interested in hearing any evidence to the contrary, no matter how credible it might be. And she isn’t bothered at all when you point out that she cannot produce any scientific evidence supporting her beliefs. The bottom line is this: She is right and you are wrong. And that’s just the way it is. And also, she just doesn’t want to talk about it.
Executive summary
I wanted to share this conversation with you because it was very short and it shows you exactly and concisely exactly what we are up against in trying to change people’s minds.
The short story is this:
- She is not interested in hearing any evidence that she got it wrong.
- It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence supporting her position. She just doesn’t want to go there.
- She is right and I am wrong. Period. End of story. No discussion is warranted.
So you can point out that the Emperor has No Clothes (i.e., that there is no evidence supporting her beliefs), and you can be absolutely right, but she simply doesn’t care to re-examine her belief system and nothing you can say is going to change that.
Our conversation
Summary
Even after you point out there is no evidence supporting their belief system, it just doesn’t matter to them. Even when lives (or the health of our kids) are at stake.
They just want you to go away so they can avoid the cognitive dissonance that would result from having to confront the fact that they got it backwards and have actually been harming people all these years, instead of helping people.
Oh… and one last thing… Mark Twain never said that, did you realize that?
For the full story on the origin of that quote, see this article.
However, I’m not going to try to convince you that you’ve been fooled on that one ;).
