Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/14/measles-warning-in-los-angeles.html
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In late December, one person who was sick with the highly contagious viral infection visited several stores and restaurants in Malibu, Pasadena and Santa Monica while contagious, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The most shameful thing about this particular outbreak in this geographic area is that it’s more than likely that the anti-vaxxers responsible are educated and affluent parents who should know better.
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At a certain point, choosing not to vaccinate without a legitimate medical reason should be considered equivalent to driving without insurance. Feel free not to vaccinate, but be ready to pay fines and the medical bills of people you infect.
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Welcome to California! You can have a kid, but if you don’t vaccinate it can’t go to school.
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Hopefully those aren’t the Californians that are moving up here to Portland.
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Any person who chooses not to vaccinate their children should be automatically arrested and jailed for reckless endangerment and their children removed to protective custody.
And no. I really don’t care what your magic sky magician says about it.
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That was my assumption as well since I live in the area and definitely know a lot of affluent head-in-the-sand types, but it appears that this is largely affecting the Orthodox Jewish communities just to the south of me. For context, in the past few decades a lot of orthodox sects have been buying up property in Orange & Rockland counties, dominating town boards and creating highly insular communities. Perfect recipe for shit like this.
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“Hey, ma-a-a-an, I’m an atheist. But you know, there are, like, alternatives to Western medicine that aren’t dominated by big pharma.”
[sadly, a lot of liberals and progressives fall for this woo. It’s not only conservative religious fundies and Alex Jones fans.]
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Now, now. Let’s not jump to conclusions. 
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Looking at the LAT article, it looks like this was a local who spent time in some very affluent and blue-leaning areas of town. But we can’t be sure.
It’s also a tricky business trying to correlate anti-vaxx sentiment to political affiliation:
Correlating to critical thinking skills, on the other hand…
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Most of the anti-vaxxers around her are crunchies with little or no religious affiliation. It’s tough because they’re often people I agree with on ecological issues otherwise, but then… it comes up. It also brings up some nasty issues with disability that anger me deeply, because many of them at some level are saying they’d rather watch their child literally die than raise an autistic kid (regardless of the fact that autism isn’t even caused by vaccines). That indicates a deep bigotry and prejudice that I simply refuse to associate with.
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After our respective postings (your source is more recent than mine; see my source’s ‘conclusion’ re liberals), I’m starting to think that the jury isn’t out yet on who is more anti-vaxx. Either way, though…
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Herd immunity is a socialist plot!
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I’m not going to argue in favor of people skipping the measles vaccine, but it is interesting to me how that vaccine in particular really stirs up people’s passions. If you’re just looking at the total number of preventable deaths, the flu is and always has been orders of magnitude more deadly than measles. And I know plenty of strongly pro-vaccine folks who neglect to get their annual flu shot from time to time, even though you’re far, far more likely to transmit the flu to a vulnerable person than you are to transmit measles. Yeah, the flu shot isn’t very effective, but due to the high number of deaths the data still suggest that universal annual flu shots could prevent more deaths than universal measles shots, at least in a country like the US where the majority of people aren’t also fighting severe malnutrition.
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Yeah, that’s a big part of what bothers me about it. I get that no one wants their kid to be disabled to the point of being non-communicative or needing intense care for their entire lives. But if the measles vaccine did have a 1 in 500 chance of causing autism it would still be an obviously good idea.
It reminds me of when the computer simulation of womb-stats said my kid had a 1 in 10,000 chance of having Down Syndrome. They could do an amniocentesis to check for sure, but it would involve about a 1 in 300 risk of death (recent studies have said less, but still like 1 in 1600).
I was thinking, “What the hell kind of crazy idea is that?” I mean, if you like those odds you’d have to think it is substantially worse to be dead than to be alive with Down Syndrome, or, if you are a total psycho, at least that it is substantially worse to have a kid with Down Syndrome than to have no kid at all. Some people don’t want kids, but if you do want kids, that calculation seems distressing.
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I was with you up until “Feel free not to vaccinate”.
Sorry, but no. Vaccination doesn’t work if you’re free to ignore it. Absent some compelling medical reason - and I don’t mean Dr. Tenpenny or “I’ve done my research” - it should be mandatory. You aren’t just endangering yourself and your filthy crotchfruit. You’re endangering everyone.
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It sounds like some sort of collectivist sheeple thing
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Just tell them that the fluoride has been removed from the vaccines.
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