“Exploring Science Literacy and the Literacy Communities of the Anti-Vaccination Movement”
by Wyn Andrews-Richards | Xchanges 11.2
The God Argument — Faith over Evidence
A different member of the group commented by linking an article to another natural wellness website, Living Whole. This article was entitled “God does not Support Vaccines.” Generally, the author produces quotes from the Bible that support her assertion that God doesn’t support vaccines. This article is quite different from the blog post on the Natural News Website, as it does provide links to scholarly sources. In following some of these links, some of these sources were indeed publications found in peer-reviewed journals. However, the gap between communication and competence is quite clear in the author’s writing. For example, she states, “And then there’s the issue of contamination. Not only are the additives in vaccines considered contaminants from a biblical standpoint, the contaminants themselves are often contaminated (making them unavoidably unsafe).” She then cites the abstract from the 2010 article “Human and animal vaccine contaminations,” by Paul-Pierre Pastoret from the journal Biologicals.
The abstract states, “Vaccination is one of the most important public health accomplishments. However, since vaccine preparation involves the use of materials of biological origin, vaccines are subject to contamination by micro-organisms” (Pastoret, 2010). The abstract goes on to mention specific historical examples of vaccine contamination, describing how these incidents led to strict safety regulations. While this is a reasonable article, it is ultimately inappropriate in its use by the writer. The problematic appearance of science literacy the author affords herself manifests first in the link to the scholarly source. It is published in the Elsevier database, which is not free of cost to the general public. All that is readily available to her readers is the abstract. It appears her intention is to count on readers seeing the title of the article, “Human and Animal Vaccine Contaminations,” and assuming that she has read the article from beginning to end and has the science literacy to competently interpret the work.
In her biography, she states that she graduated from college at 19 and law school at 22. She calls herself a “Natural Health Educator” and explains that she “became a certified Naturopath after completing 4 years of training at two different institutions.” It is noteworthy that her actual degrees and institutions are not published. By the dawn of Christianity, the early Doctors of the Church, such as St. Augustine, recognized that the Bible was allegorical, not the literal word of God. Additionally, in a post-Enlightenment society, science has replaced traditional religious authorities as the way to explain the world.