It would also probably help if researchers and advocates who seek to stop rumors ceased to treat parents like naughty children or ignoramuses. If you are honest with people and clearly communicate limits to your knowledge, parents may actually respond better.



All epidemiological studies on which pronouncements of safety are based have detectability thresholds for statistical reasons. It is impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines cannot do harm to individual children, it is only possible to prove that any hypothetical harm is not a public health problem. Therefore, mandates to vaccinate are themselves based on public health considerations of greater good or protecting the public from epidemics. If you clearly acknowledge this, you can perhaps have a reasoned discussion with parents, based on their obligations to society. If you make an authority based claim which is based on a false premise of absolute certainty, you simply convince people to the inherent arrogance of elites. This is further reinforced by never ending contradictions in public reporting of statistical studies in medicine, which frequently report contradictory results. This is not necessarily because of someone's ill will, but rather because of inherent limitations of statistical studies, sometimes poor understanding of these limitations by researchers, and somewhat sensationalist approach of so called science writers to the reporting of published results.