Strong, but weakly held
When we are convinced that we are right, it is tempting to crank up our determination, making us stray into the land of fallacies
I am of an age to still have the visible signs of my smallpox vaccination, though the sands of time have done their best to erode the scar away. (In those days, boys got their vaccination administered on the outside of their upper arm, while girls got theirs on the inside, as they were assumed to be more likely to wear tops that would expose their arms all the way to the shoulder. O tempora…) That small scar was, of course, an opportunity for curious children to ask what this was all about, and many parents — like mine — will have explained the purpose and the benefits of vaccination. Hardly a decade later, the eradication of the disease thanks to mass vaccination reinforced to my youthful mind its remarkable power. Vaccination was a near-miracle, and an unconditional must.
A stretch too far
But is it? A few days ago, the economist Bryan Caplan tweeted that he had refused his physician’s offer of a tetanus booster, on the basis that it kills no more than two Americans per year (that is 1 in more than 150 million, or about half the likelihood of being killed by an asteroid). It attracted many hundreds of comments, many of them derogatory…
