To Understand Anti-vaxxers, Consider Aristotle
Among the many difficulties imposed upon America by the pandemic, the scourge of anti-vaccine sentiment—and the preventable deaths caused as result—ranks among the most frustrating, especially for infectious-disease doctors like me.
People who are hospitalized with COVID-19 rarely refuse therapy, but acceptance of vaccines to help prevent infection has been considerably more limited. Seventy percent of Americans have received the initial complement of vaccine injections, and many fewer have received the boosters designed to address viral variants and confer additional protection. Why are so many people resistant to this potentially lifesaving treatment?
Some explanations are unique to our era—the awful weaponization of science in a deeply partisan political environment during the age of social media, for instance. But the concept of vaccine hesitancy is not new. Such hesitancy is, in a larger sense, a rejection of science—a phenomenon that far predates the existence of vaccines.
One of the earliest documented controversies in science denialism comes from the field of astronomy. In the third century B.C., the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. The idea that the Earth and planets
