> Le 12 nov. 2009 à 23:46, SA a écrit :
>
> > JC Helary wrote:
> >> 1) France 2, one of the French national broadcasting channel showed
> mostly people who did not want to take the vaccine, including medical
> personal in hospitals, and interviewed pediatricians that actually advised
> _against_ taking the vaccine.
> >
> > Huh. So it sounds like there's a lot more skepticism about the vaccine in
> France. Why do you think that is?
>
> There may be skepticism but it may simply be that because health care
> is good and paid sick leave is not an issue, there is much less fear of
> adverse effects.
> Whereas in the US, without social security, reasonable health care,
> guaranteed sick leave, people are feeling very insecure and fall into the
> trap of the pharmaceutical industry.
> Plus, the swine flu has proved to not be a dangerous flu so I suppose
> that in France people are betting on good hygiene rather than on chemicals.
>
> Jean-Christophe Helary
>
If this parallels research about agbiotech, the better educated Europeans are about scientific and technological issues - and, as aggregate populations, Europeans are way way more educated about such issues - the more skeptical they are of technological solutions to problems defined in asocial and scientistic terms.
In the US, where even the far smaller percentage of folks better educated on such issues are educated in a "public understanding of science" manner, the more people know they more they accept expert-led technological solutions to social problems defined in scientistic ways.
What's interesting, of course, is that these tendencies do not play themselves out in the same ways for all technical issues. My sense is that Americans are both more trusting AND more reactive depending on the issue at hand.