You are absolutely right about that. But a vaccine-caused febrile seizure death is just as real as a fever-triggered febrile seizure death caused by measles or the flu, so you still need to count it in the statistics.
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Gosh, humans are so cute.
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While I’m in favor of not driving drunk (I never do) I think it’s a bit scary to suggest that the government should impose civil and criminal penalties for doing so, no matter how beneficial.
Plus, you can still get in an accident if you’re driving stone cold sober.
I say the more responsible thing to do is not drive on public roads, and keep your children seat belted at all times.
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Your right to be stupid ends when it endangers the lives of others, period.
Parents who want to protect their kids from a 1-in-1,000,000 improbability are deliberately choosing to have those children be carriers and victims of diseases with much, much worse odds.
No vaccines, no school. No vaccines, no job. You can believe there isn’t gravity, but you don’t get to push someone else’s kid off a roof to ‘prove’ it.
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One of the things that bothers me so much about the anti-vaxx community is that it’s moral outrage shields other aspects of modern life from more thorough examination. Moms are worried about autism, OK, that’s fine, but there are so many other places to look for a cause. Air pollution, plastic packaging on everything, maternal history of anti-depressants, background inflammation, obese moms, insane “detox” moms, etc etc. But instead of devoting more of our (limited) scientific resources to better study those phenomena, here we are wasting our time and energy combatting mass hysteria and science denialism.
As to those who don’t want to be vaccinated no matter what, that’s fine by me provided y’all move away from us civilized folk who don’t want us, our loved ones, or other vulnerable members of society exposed to a greater risk of preventable disease from your idiocy. So retreat to an anti-vaxx commune and live among like-minded people. Y’all can wallow in Facebook disinformation together all you want, just keep your plague vectors contained.
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What really drives me bonkers about this whole anti-vax thing is the utter dehumanization of autistic people who are caught up in this mess. People would rather risk their child dying of measles than have them wind up on the autism spectrum.
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Yep, that’s also an insane aspect, but with this kind of worry and this kind of psychological receptivity to misinformation, I suspect that moms would be just as ardent if Wakefield had fabricated data about vaccines being linked to impaired eye sight or depression. When someone gets worked up into an irrational state where they’re looking to blame anything but their own actions, they’re going to latch onto anything that helps them keep their rationalizations afloat. Even though it’s on super-sketchy ethical grounds, I’ve wondered if the emotional difference between misinformation and truth is too vast for misinformation to be effectively countered with more truth; what if we need counter-misinformation designed to trigger emotional biases that makes its audience more receptive to an objective fact?
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You clearly are too young to have observed the effects of widespread outbreaks of various diseases. WHen I was a kid, Salk was a national hero. AND every school kid lined up in school to get a polio vaccine. Nobody bitched and nobody started whining “nanny state.” My how we’ve fallen as a nation.
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They want something to blame.
The truth is, autism is mostly caused by genetic factors and the only way you can prevent it effectively would be by not having the kid in the first place.
It’s luck. Sometimes difficult things happen for no good reason. But the primitive monkey brains humans have are super uncomfortable with bad things happening for no reason and not having contol.
So people make up grand conspiracies so they can try to at least mentally exercise some control. And it’s a helluva lot easier to believie in multiple contradictory grand conspiracies than it is to become an epidemiologist, or a physician.
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This. Letting a parent know that you can and did check for known adverse reactions is way more reasuring and scientific than calling em all stupid and othering them. I do vaxx.
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And this you are witnessing is a very common consequence of having a vaccine discussion. The antivaxx militia gets wind of it and sends their footsoldiers to flood the discussion with predictable, easily disprovable and repeatedly disproven talking points. Engaging is generally useless. Just fyi.
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Bullshit it is. Is it banned in corporate headquarters. Sure.
But by all means head to your local garage station or perhaps some other non white collar work place.
You’ll find people smoking. No issues.
Smoking tobacco is NOT illegal. It is banned from certain types of establishments but it various between regions and states. Example: can’t smoke inside a video game arcade but you can in a casino. Can’t smoke in a posh bar in NYC but you can in a bourbon bar in Nashville.
Again. Is making vaccininations legally required a good idea. Sure. Can you do it on a national level?..Good fucking luck with that.
I am having a really hard time comprehending what about that you aren’t grasping.
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If you are coming here to spread anti-vaccine rhetoric, just keep going. You and your account will be eaten. Vaccines are far from perfect, but misinformation on vaccines is perhaps even more dangerous than not getting vaccinated - you can “infect” far more people with science-blindness.
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Not when they are dying from a preventable disease. I’m never argued the “can only be improved” line. That’s a strawman of your own creation. I’m simply pointing out what can be done to encourage vaccinations without getting in to the religious freedom arguments. Of course the problem needs to be tackled on many fronts.
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There is no known test to tell in advance if someone will react negatively to a vaccine, and in fact there is some reason to believe that it is to some degree truly random [1]. Iv’e gone over sixty years as one of the disgusting people who never gets so much as a sore arm from a vaccine. Or I was until this week; the second round of the new pneumococcus vaccine left my arm sore and me with a fever for a day. Nothing bad, sure beats pneumonia, but reminded me that others don’t have it as easy as I generally do.
Throw the dice, but bet with the odds.
[1] The whole cellular immune response thing is apparently a bit of “whatever fits first.”
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There is an element of trust at the core of the anti-vax issue. Mostly, trust in the state, trust is the pharma business. It’s easy to have trust in the scientific method, less so in the big pharma and in the state. How long back in your countrys history do you have to go before you find forced incidents of mass-sterilisation on a minority group, before you find outright evil human medical experimentation. Something to have in mind.
Also this social contract you are talking about,
Yeah right? Imagine all the horrible viruses you get from eating snails! And making cuckoo clocks and chocolate! Can you picture the depravities those … ah … depraved people get up to? Huh? Or does it make ya wanna vomit!!!
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Question…who decided we shouldn’t trust federally mandated or pharmaceutical industry produced things like vaccinations?
I’ll answer it for you…the same people spouting that they shouldn’t vaccinate their kids because AUTISM are the same people saying “DON’T TRUST THEM BIG GOVERNMENT TYPES…they out ta git ya!”
Therein lies the rub. The same people spreading the lunatic “don’t trust anyone” are the same people saying “don’t trust the science”. Its a self fulfilling prophecy.
So…if you want to espouse a theory that the AMA and entire medical community is potentially going to be all in on some massive conspiracy to sterilize a minority group…that’s fine you have every right to think that way. But that throws you in the same camp as the anti-vaxxers.
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This is a brief discussion of the phenomenon we just saw here, as well as an interesting study on the demographics of the antivaxx movement. And a huge tip of the hat to @orenwolf for cleaning up the mess made. Thank you. I have seen these folks silence vaccine discussions before just by making it impossible to say anything through the shrieking. Nice to see them gone here.
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This is freedom of speech. You are not entitled to other people’s spaces. You are free to accept the consequences of your speech. You are free to have your speech opposed. And you are free to say whatever you like using your own resources.
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