The vaccination problem

One of the things that really bums me out about people who are against vaccination is that the arguments they believe in are so often nonsensical, if not based on outright fraud.

They're afraid of "toxins", but they don't really know what that means. 

They're afraid of "overloading their child's immune system", but they don't understand what happens in an immune system when it's exposed to a vaccine, or when it's exposed to an actual virus. 

They want to "build their children's natural immune system", but they don't understand that the only way to form a natural immunity to a disease is to contract that disease. 

They worry about side effects from vaccines, without understanding that the side effects from vaccines, in the rare cases when they occur, are typically milder forms of the effects of the disease itself. 

They are not bad people, and they are not necessarily stupid people, but they are people who have been given bad information and are operating under a belief structure in which they have invested their children's health. They are socially invested in communities that reinforce their beliefs.

These are people who are not likely to change their minds, regardless of the evidence, even if their children get sick, and even if vulnerable people die because of them. 

This makes changing the problem very difficult, and doing so involves a very sticky territory around regulating the alternative healthcare industry, and also around free speech, specifically the scare websites making unsupported claims about vaccination.

So what do we do?