From antivacunas to terraplanistas | Hundred …

Those who say that the Earth is flat, those who oppose vaccines, "alternative" therapies without scientific resources. Researchers from different branches will discuss next Saturday the advance of pseudoscience with immediate negative impact, as in the case of the anti-vaccine movement, and in the long run because they go against critical thinking.

"Before the terraplanist meeting in Columbus, we were already watching with concern the advance of pseudoscience and the urgent question we have now: what makes these beliefs so attractive?" Astrophysicist Susana Pedrosa, researcher at Conicet and vice president of the Argentine Association of Astronomy.

Pedrosa, who lives in Madrid where she is a professor at the university, said that "the advancement of these beliefs is not innocuous." On the one hand, it has an immediate impact on the anti-vaccine movement, whose consequences are occurring today, with for example the relapse of measles in New York ". "But they also have an impact because they attack the critical thinking of a society accustomed to thinking without scientific evidence and returning to a magical thought," he added.

Regarding the "National and International Meeting of Terraplanistas" which was held in March in Colón and gathered 80 people, the researcher criticized the support provided by the municipality. "This is a problem because we find that there is public funding for this type of magical thinking," he said.

In the same vein, Diego Golombek, biologist and researcher at Conicet, said that "magical, sometimes simplistic and miraculous explanations have existed throughout history, the theme is to understand why they find an echo and the answer is very complex".

"On the one hand, the doubt, which science proposes, has historically lost ground against the sure answers, even if they are false, on the other, conspiracy theories, those that go to the Against something, have a driving force that evolves C 'was still very powerful, "said the researcher. Golombek noted that in the field of pseudoscience, we can think of two groups: "Those of astrology, where if a person wants to ignore the horoscope, it is his life, and those who have a public impact like anti-vaccine movement because if a person does not vaccinate Your children can increase the viral load of a whole society. "" What we should review from science is how to communicate our ideas because, on the side of reason, we see that it does not work, so we have to invent another way, perhaps more emotional or more complicit, "added Golombek.

The incidence of measles continues to grow in the United States, where at least 704 cases were recorded in 2019, the highest figure in 25 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which insisted on the importance of being vaccinated against the disease. Eradicated in this country in 2000. 71% of cases correspond to unvaccinated persons, 11% to persons vaccinated but with one of the recommended doses and 18% did not know whether they had been vaccinated or not. At the same time, Europe recorded 82 596 cases of measles last year, a figure that tripled the number of people infected in 2017, according to the World Health Organization's regional office. Health (WHO), which reported that in 2018, 72 children and adults died. this disease on the continent.

In this context, the Argentine Association of Astronomy organized the conference "Science and non science: elimination of myths" May 4 at 17 hours at the Cultural Center of Science, in which, besides Golombek, the physicist Alberto Rojo, the mathematician Guillermo Martínez, researcher Ana María Vara and science journalist Valeria Román.