"Where do climate change deniers, anti-GMO activists, and vaccine conspiracy theorists overlap one another? According to a recent study, described in Mother Jones, they seem to triangulate on a tendency to believe in conspiracies. And evidently, according to the study authors, no single theory has a stronger hold on the minds of such like-tending folk as the vaccines pharmaco-governmento-medico conspiracy theory does. According to Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science-and Reality, and writing at Mother Jones:
The finding may cast a great deal of light on the strange persistence of anti-vaccine views, which have centered on the claim that childhood vaccines are behind an alleged "epidemic" of autism. This assertion has been rejected by scientists. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute of Medicine have both weighed in strongly on the matter; and one chief proponent of the vaccine concerns, Andrew Wakefield, has even seen his original 1998 paper raising concerns about the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine retracted by the journal that published it, The Lancet.
Yet vaccine fears have persisted in the face of all scientific refutation (not to mention medical and public health experts saying that the failure to vaccinate is downright dangerous). And if these beliefs are often conspiratorial, that might help explain why. Almost by definition, conspiracy theories are irrefutable; rejections by scientific authorities just become part of the conspiracy."
