Individuals and Lobby groups such as ‘The Australian Vaccination Network’ lobby against a variety of vaccination-related programs, suggesting that vaccines are unsafe and dangerous. For some parents “the (slim) probability of imposing disability and possibly death on one’s own child (through the vaccination) outweighs the (natural) chances of contracting the disease,” (Jones 2001). These organisations/individuals have been labelled as controversial, by medical doctors and the Australian government who believe “the relative risks of vaccines versus contracting the actual illness….clearly favour vaccination,” (Jones 2001). Vaccination programs work to eradicate disease when all eligible people participate, but when parents suspect that such programs …show more content…
The vaccine hesitancy arising from the growing distrust of institutionalized medicine is a serious problem. If it continues to grow, then ultimately we may be exposed to a series of global pandemics.
Urich Beck’s ‘Risk Society’ (1992) is about the dangers we have introduced into the world by developing and using high modern technologies. Beck does not argue that it is more risky today, rather the nature of the risks we face are changing. Risks come less from natural hazards but from uncertainties created by social development and development of science and technology. Beck states, “Risk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with the hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself,” (Beck 1992, pp.260).
“Because the new risks are largely invisible, knowledge plays an increasingly important role in the risk society, as people work to establish causal links between seemingly unrelated phenomena.” The collection of knowledge can sometimes be difficult as “our era of increasingly globalized risks has led to a proliferation of risk management experts, from medical doctors to spin doctors,” (Beck