Bokelskere.no

There are hundreds of examples in the field of medicine
where fundamentally flawed ideas have gained public support

and were kept alive by belief momentum:
Eugenics,
numerous psychiatric diagnoses,
harmful drugs like thalidomide,
fever reducers, diethylstilbestrol, bloodletting,
and unbalanced hormone replacement

are several examples of faulty ideas that have historically
attained a level of scientific and societal legitimacy.

Not only have these strange types of beliefs been accepted,
but in the midst of their unquestioned superiority,
better ideas were overlooked.

In the hope of preventing disease, vaccination took hold as
the only way to combat smallpox.
The original belief was that vaccination was a safe way
to acquire lifelong immunity.

This turned out to be untrue, and thus had to be redressed as
a “temporary way of making smallpox milder.”
Even though revaccinations were required yearly for some
people,
even though there was great success using isolation and
disinfection after abandoning vaccination in Leicester,

and even though there were large numbers of vaccination-
related deaths and vaccine failures,
devotion to vaccination by the medical profession became
firmly established.