Imagine your plane crashes in the middle of the desert. You are one of the survivors. One of the other survivors says he knows how to deal with this and will lead you out of the desert with his navigational skills.

After some time it turns out he belives the earth is flat. You know he is factually wrong and he will lead the whole group in circles till you starve. So you could embrace humility.. but on the other hand there are facts about the world that you don't really have to seriously debate, unless good points of doubt are raised that you can check. There are situations where not pointing out somebody's wrong believes and demand a rational explaination from them is the ethically wrong thing to do.

The odds in this story are starvation, the odds in the vaccination fad are: either killing people by damaging vaccines, or killing people by not vaccinating them. The thing is – this is not just some oppinion, the outcome of this will (independent of who is right) kill people.

I am not a person who vaccinates a lot, but I do and of course I was curious if there is something behind the claims of the supposed side effects of vaccination. And what I did was to embracing humility. I decided not to take a stance on this until I informed myself and talked to people who were convinced about the damaging nature of vaccines. The claims made here would be revolutionary if these people were right. So you check out where the idea comes from and you find that one study with multiple metholodical failures which comes to a weak conclusion that there is a link between autism and vaccines. And then you find a flood of studies who can't find that link. Then you talk with anti-vaxxers about it and suddenly you are the devil for even considering there is a doubt. But remember the stakes – in both cases innocent people die! What I discovered then is that this is not about truth or what is really to be observed in reality, but it rather is a belief rooted in a general "clean eating" ideology where detoxing is the law of the land (all of which seems to be based on a vague gut feeling about the own body and how it must be only be fed with certain substances). For others it was a part of a general conspiracy, that after questioning turned out so kookoo that I thaught I was talking to a schizophrenic patient at a mental facility. So even if it turns out they were right and vaccines have a net-negative effect on humanity, they just were right by accident and not because they really had a rational point that anyone could take seriously and follow.

But given the odds I considered they could be right, checked for myself, reached a the conclusion they very certainly are not right, also reached the conclusion that this idea will in a net result produce more harm than good and decided to speak out against it.

None of the anti-vaxxers I had contact with ever atempted to show this kind of humility or consideration themselves, despite this beeing a situation like the one in the desert: you weigh your belief against the lifes of other people. If I where in these shoes I'd try my best to disproof myself, because the consequences in both directions are not a joke. That is why I am interested in where these believes come from and why people so strongly stand behind this. And in my definition this is humility. I'd take back the "of course" as it displays the certainty I had after doing that research. There are obviously people for whom it isn't nearly as clear.