I am sure I have said before in other threads. Dear anit-vax loons,
FUCK YOU
Fuck the anti-vaxxers. They are sacrificing the lives of others to assuage imaginary fears that they have no excuse believing in.
Fuck them.
Not vaccinating your kid when thereâs no medical reason is child abuse and people who donât vaccinate their children should be called out as the negligent parents they are.
I favour the heavy hand of science-supported legislation and enforcement to bring these bat-shit crazy anti-vaxxers into line. Reasoning wonât work.
Oh and Iâve said this before, but parents (term used generally) have no rights with respect to raising children, just responsibilities.
What are you, one of those godless communist liberal fascists?
Yup. Your child isnât your property to do with as you see fit. They are a person. As such they have rights, and you have obligations. Itâs up to the state to defend their rights not to die in childhood completely preventably because youâre too stupid and fearful to understand how science works.
Legislation may be heavy-handed, but itâs a last resort we must consider when peopleâs lives are on the line.
Maybe Tennessee can invite Anti-Vaxxers to the isolation ward for an immune-system building Malaria Party.
This is where shit like freedom of religion comes into conflict with human rights. Religious parents are free to indoctrinate their children from the earliest age, even arguably torture them psychologically with damaging teachings and the kid canât legally do much about it until theyâre 18 and can hopefully think for themselves. Little kids believe what their parents tell them and donât have the knowledge or capacity to decide if they want to get vaccinated in contrast to what their parents believe.
Parents have the parental discretion to arguably ruin their childrenâs lives and futures. Fortunately, a lot of kids bounce back when they gain their freedom and many parentsâ misguided parenting is negligible in long term effects.
Iâm old enough to have gotten measles the hard way, before the vaccine. I donât remember it well - I was 5, my sister was 4, and we both had the rash and fever for a while, but not the other long-term side effects like death. Had a neighbor a couple years older who had polio - Iâm really glad we were able to get the vaccine.
These folks are criminals. Theyâre endangering not only their own kids, but other kids who are too young to get the vaccines, and people who couldnât get them because of allergies, and people for whom the vaccine wasnât 100% effective or for whom the protection didnât last as long as usual.
My kids are vaccinated. My son developed food sensitivities (awful eczema) that will last his whole life, beginning when he had just started eating real food, right after he got his 6-month vaccinations. There are two likely explanations:
(a) He was going to develop food sensitivities anyway, and the vaccinations were just coincidence.
(b) He is one of the small fraction of children who have a significant adverse reaction to vaccinations, in this case causing his body to treat proteins from certain foods as toxic.
If itâs (a), there was nothing I could do anyway. If itâs (b), itâs unfortunate and vaccination is still good, still worth doing, and still a value to society; just one that some few people pay a higher price for. My son is perhaps one of those people.
My reason for sharing this is the insulting, dismissive tone that is demonstrated above from people blaming anti-vaxxers for this measles outbreak. Everyone seems to have the idea that they are âcrazyâ, âloonyâ, or have âno medical reasonâ.
Human beings are fantastically good at pattern recognition, and there are scant situations in which an adult is paying more attention than from parents (especially mothers) to their child. Itâs entirely rational and reasonable for a parent to observe a pattern like âHe was eating this food without issue, had his vaccinations, and now heâs getting sickâ and conclude that the vaccination is to blame. That conclusion could be wrong, and should be tested; perhaps there is something more benign that is causing the problem. But the conclusion itself is valid based on observed facts.
I put the blame on the medical community and commonly-repeated opinions like those displayed above. The message should not be âVaccines are completely safe!â, because that is a lie. People arenât stupid, they eventually figure that out. There are many Americans who are afraid of doctors because of how often they have been lied to. The message should be âVaccines are very, very rarely harmful and provide an enormous benefit to society! Support society today!â
Dismissing people who have a fear of vaccines is not smart, not constructive, and not honest. Letâs acknowledge that those fears exist, and help people understand the risks and the benefit to society, and agree to support the greater good. Some few kids will pay a higher price⌠and we should all be grateful, because the alternative is a medieval-scale outbreak of the plague.
ââŚand people who couldnât get them because of allergiesâŚâ
You know that this actually is the core of the anti-vaxxer movement, right? The problem with allergies is you almost never know you have them until you are exposed. People who are afraid their kid will be allergic to a vaccine (or the mercury or the eggs itâs made from or the aluminum or the formaldehyde orâŚ) are the ones who are choosing to skip them.
(US Childhood vaccine schedule) Vaccines havenât had any mercury in them for over a decade (the seasonal flu vaccine still uses thimerosal if memory serves, but the various vaccines on the childhood schedule donât, although the anti-vaxxers would say otherwise even if theyâre wrong). Thatâs a non-starter.
Eggs, sure.
The formaldehyde in there is in very low concentrations, but it too is in there. Albeit at levels less than what you find in a lot of foods you feed children anyway. And it serves multiple functions. Not the least of which is making sure something nasty isnât growing in the vaccine, and also to make the body react more to the vaccine so you need less of it to gain a proper immune response.
From your previous post, I immensely appreciate your even-handedness, and wish there were more people around like you who are willing to admit that while in some rare cases, vaccines can cause some harm to children itâs usually still worth it even to the child affected. And itâs tragic that your child has these sensitivities. But the wonderful thing about science is that itâs always improving and learning from mistakes. Even with vaccines. Weâre still working to make something thatâs incredibly safe and effective even safer and more effective. Canât say the same about non-science based medicine.
Personally, Iâm of the opinion that vaccines have become somewhat of a victim of their own success. Itâs been a generation since weâve had pandemics like Polio, where you go off to summer break and some of your friends just donât come back to school because they contracted polio swimming in a quarry.
We havenât had gyms full of iron lungs for a generation. People forget the absolute scourge on humanity vaccine preventable diseases used to be. And their forgetfulness is now starting to cost lives.
Thank you for your comments.
Couldnât have said this better.
I survived Pertussis as a small child, with, I think no lasting damage. Iâm lucky. I was vaccinated, according to the card my folks keep, but I guess I was exposed to it either before I gained any immunity, or it wasnât effective for me.
This is why itâs important to vaccinate every single person who can be. Natural immunity is bullshit in comparison. My folks didnât have me vaccinated for Varicella and I got the chickenpox. According to my folks they decided against the vaccine because âchicken pox is mildâ and they âdidnât want to deal with yet another shotâ because I was a crybaby and they just couldnât stand it. Considering my personality and genetics, itâs very likely Iâll get shingles later on down the line because of that. And if you know anyone whoâs gotten shingles, they can attest itâs something that a prick in the arm is well worth avoiding.
If Measles were eradicated in the USA, is this outbreak from people visiting or moving from another country where it still existed? Was it just dormant? Is it other animal to human transmittable? Is the vaccine a live strain hence making the vaccinated contagious for a short period to the non-vaccinated (like with some other vaccines)?
This is one point that Iâm a bit unclear on. Could anyone with any insight please shed some light on this aspect. Thanks in advance! Cheers.
IANAL but as understand it, âyes and noâ here. Some rights in the US are activated by birth (citizenship) some by age of majority. Most all ârightsâ are subject to interpretation of SCOTUS anyway.
The second sentence of the Wiki article says that the MMR is made with live attenuated virus.
Although according to the CDC, Measles doesnât have a non-human reservoir.
Iâm sure you will rack up the likes for the Doctrine of His Highness Dawkins, but it seems research has show that most anti-vax folks arenât taking that stance from religious convictions but for lack of understanding and fear as described later in this thread.
Iâm all for vaccinating kids, and generally doing what you can to give them the best chance in, well, everything. But really, do you actually mean this?
So I have no right to choose how my son is educated, or what he eats, or, or, or, ⌠So who does get to choose? You? Some politician with an axe to grind?
I imagine that the ârightsâ and âobligationsâ @LDoBeâs talking about here somewhat transcend the parochial accidentality of nationhood. And Iâll just leave this here - despite my having had rather great parents.
