Anti-Vaxx numbers still rising, stupidity will kill our children

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/08/anti-vaxx-numbers-still-rising.html

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Now that there’s an antivaxx president who consorts with people like RFK jr and Wakefield, I doubt this will get better soon.

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Trump presidency means everything gets worse.

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Suicide by deliberate stupidity is, in some sense, probably a good thing for the world.

There’s only that one edge case keeping it from being a complete win, namely the possibility of a too-young-for-vax baby getting infected. Maybe the answer to that is to require certified vax records for all people (including kids) who would otherwise come into contact with said babies.

Then just sit back and let the chips fall.

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There’s not one edge-case. There’s many.

For instance, people with HIV. The elderly. The otherwise immune-compromised. People for whom the vaccine didn’t take. People who are allergic to vaccines.

Herd immunity protects the vulnerable who can’t get vaccinated.

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At this point we pretty much deserve to die.

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Dang it.

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Suppose you’re a healthy young parent. You haven’t been sick in years. How real could the threat be?

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Depends how stupid you are really. History Channel and Discovery should start running specials on the great epidemics.

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polio-cartoon-1957-wonder-why-my-parents-didnt-give-6247553.jpg525×600 120 KB

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But this is suicide only in very rare cases, because the children are usually not making the decision to not get vaccinated. The word is filicide, a parent killing their own children.

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Also, a lot of the victims will be children (e.g. measles, polio) who aren’t responsible for their idiotic parents.

edit: ninja’d

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Jane Jacobs had it right: we’re truly re-entering the Age of Ignorance.*

[* this book really deserves to be on the Amazon non-fiction bestsellers list]

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Have… have you SEEN what those channels run in today’s day and age? Feels like they’re getting further from reality and more into… some sort of random bullshit trash than ever before. Good luck getting them to show something actually important like how terrible diseases we’ve got vaccinations for used to kill hoards of people…

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In '59 or '60 (1st grade, but I’m too old to remember when that was; -) an unvaccinated kid down the road contracted polio – his old man knew the vaccine was a Commie plot. (This poor kid was one of only a couple hundred in the U.S. to get polio that year, IIRC.) Came to learn later that this mutt believed Roosevelt’s Warm Springs retreat was actually a lab to learn how to infect as many as possible…FDR had inspired Stalin at Yalta to kill freedom by messing with the water, promote infectious vaccines, subjugate us to U.N., etc.

Stupidity knows no era.

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Of course they’ll run specials on the great epidemics. Especially the great autism epidemic, I assume.

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Say I am approached by a group of dummies anti-vaxxers as I’m walking across campus. Do I just ignore them and keep walking (thereby not wasting my time) or do I engage them? I tend to do the former, because I have no idea what to say to these people, since they seem to cling to such ridiculous disinformation. What could I possibly say?

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Punch a nazi.

Nothing. There isn’t a lot you can tell someone who willfully believes something disproven by mountains of factual evidence. It is like people who think they are “Good Christians” but believe in not helping others who need help.

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These are just some of the deep questions of our time!

  • Are the inventions we have been using to successfully prevent epidemics something we should even bother with?
  • Is it appropriate to help men, women, and children at risk of dying horribly, often in no small part because of our government’s actions, when they look different from us and may not even be Christian?
  • As scientists all tell us that our constant emissions are having exactly the consequences you would expect from basic thermodynamics, and oil spokesmen insist that’s all just paid talk, just how much should we cut funding to research and environmental protection?
  • Now that white supremacists are openly intimidating minorities and infiltrating the government to the point where one got punched, are we doing enough to ensure their voices are heard?
  • Do poor people even deserve medicine in the first place?

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it’s basically a battle between competing stupidities at this point.

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