(Originally Posted 01/04/2007)
In a world run by Google word choice is powerful. Colloquial “vaccination” turns up mostly anti-vaxx material. Clinical “immunization” tuns up mostly sane scholarship. Doctors don’t speak human so humans often don’t hear them.
There’s a post over at medgadget about how searching google for “vaccination” turns up mostly anti-vaccination “moonbats”. One of the reasons is the medical industry’s preference for the word “immunization”.
So doctors say “immunization” while regular people and moonbats use “vaccination”. The lesson here is in a world run by Google, if you don’t speak like regular people, regular people will never hear your voice–even if you’re a doctor.
I wonder how much of our current anti-vaxx problems has been because they never saw the sane information due to the vicissitudes of Google search strings.