I see an analogy with political implications in the current concerns over vaccines. “The science is settled.”
Well, with vaccines, it is pretty much settled in the general case, but not so much in the particular. For “good” vaccines, the risk of vaccination is smaller than the risk of the disease. HPV might be a “bad” vaccine, and I’ve read that there are questions as to the worth of the routine flu vaccination. But I think almost everyone could agree that the reward outweighed the risk with polio and smallpox.
Leftists would like to transfer that discussion to global warming, by claiming the science is settled, and that compulsory behavior dictated by the latest opinions on how to go about combating it must be force on all.
0dious leftist cheesespeak. 0bama used another version that just came back to me--'Law of the land' trying to kill debate on 0bamacare. A cheap shot designed to silence the weak. Fail!
As Dr Carson said on Fox today, we have to balance the risk against the benefit.
The basic question is who does the balancing? Clearly Congress cannot evaluate the risk/benefit ratio of each vaccine. So do government scientists at the CDC make the decision? The same scientists who can’t protect their own shop from contamination and bogus information?
At the other extreme, can the parent make the decision for children with no consultaton of a doctor?
This is not limited to vaccines. Who makes the cost/benefit decision about seat-belts? Who makes the cost/benefit decision about forcing all cars to have ABS brakes?
I raise these examples because an analysis of ABS brake data shows conclusively that they save many lives and save much money on fender benders...most of that being savings of the deductible amount of insurance. Thus ABS brakes risk/benefit is clearly on the benefit side.
In contrast, using exactly the same type of analysis for seatbelts shows the benefit is so small it can’t be statistically measured..it is smaller than the margin of error.
And it happened that on FOX today Dr Carson used Seat Belts as his scientifically and statistically good example of government making the risk/benefit decision.
Dr Carson did not know his facts. That type of appealing to urban legends like seat belt benefit will come back to bite him when the media turns on him, which they will as soon as his 4th place presence forces the 5th and 6th place wannabes out of the race.
Scientific theories are just hypotheses that tend to be supported by observations. However, true scientists continually search for exceptions. There is no consensus nor are there absolutes. Even Einsein has been shown to be incorrect in some of his theories.