Well most are liberal, white, and wealthy upper/middle class. But it also a good example of white privilege, because if it were a movement of the urban ghetto or immigrants you can be sure the the government and child protective services would come down hard on them.
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Thereās a wide spectrum of mutants here and Iām certainly not about to deny your experiences or argue about with you about the way you feel.
I will just point out that connection is a two-way process and thereās no reason to assume that others here donāt find a connection with you. As far as Iām concerned, youāre one of us, like it or not.
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You win this round, L_Mariachi.
I wonder what his position on car brakes is?
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Every anti-vaxxer I know is a self-identified conservative. But then, I live in a part of the country where conservatives outnumber āliberalsā at least 3 to 1.
I put the word liberals in scare quotes because even a fair number of so-called liberals here in fly-over country are pretty thoroughly conservative when you ask their opinions on various issues.
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Yet another brilliant turn of phrase that Iāll be shamelessly working into conversation at the next opportunity.
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I worry that weāre getting the leaders we deserve. Whatever it was we did to deserve the likes of Dan Burton Iād really, really, really like to take it back.
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Weāre not talking about anti-vaxxers here, weāre talking about assholes in authority who are cynically pandering to them for votes.
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We all win any round that the likes of Dan Burton bow out of.
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Have you tried a straight tetanus-only shot instead of the combined Tetanus/Dysentery/Pertussis version thatās more common? (Or the combined shot, if you usually get the tetanus-only, though thatās less likely to help.)
(Which reminds me, I have to check which version I got last time - California had a pertussis epidemic a year or two ago because of anti-vaxxers, and I last went in for a tetanus shot a couple years back because of a cat bite, because somebody really didnāt want to go to the vet.)
But youāre probably somewhere liberal like the San Francisco Bay Area, where both right-wingers got their vaccines just to make fun of their hippie neighbors (not knowing the hippies got all kids of shots when they went to visit India that time, because theyāre not stupid.)
His position on car brakes is that the invisible foot of the marketplace will press them.
Thatās different from drivers in Boston, who think braking is the other driverās job.
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Dallas Texasā¦ most people I know are pretty conservative. Itās the well-educated professionals I know who are certain that ābig pharmaā is pushing it on us. They are the same people who are terrified of GMO, gluten and electromagnetic fields. Not saying a lot of antivaxxers arenāt righties, but this idiocy is infecting both ends of the political spectrum, and to try to pin it on conservatives is more about battle space preparation for 2016 than immunization.
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Yet we were the first to make sure everyone had powertrain insurance. Hmmmmm.
Here in the Bay Area, itās all folks to the left ā Marinites, although we have our share in the East Bay, too ā but then the ratios you say are pretty much flipped. Itās a rare case of purely bipartisan stupidity.
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bOINGbOING willfully ignores facts about mercury, as usual. I guess shilling for big pharma never grows old.
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There is no safe dose of mercury; it is a cumulative toxin. Because our environment has been poisoned with mercury since antiquity (fire-gilding, anyone?) we are all being exposed to it in our daily lives, and we have no good way of controlling that exposure. Therefore itās important to avoid it whenever we do have a choice, no matter how small the potential exposure. Knowingly pre-loading your system with mercury is insane, because that decreases your bodyās ability to withstand the invisible and unavoidable future exposures that we all must currently endure. Purposely and unnecessarily pre-loading your childrenās bodies with any amount of mercury, no matter how small, is bad craziness. You may as well feed them a pinch of lead or cadmium.
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There is no need for mercury preservatives in any pharmaceutical product. The only purpose mercury serves in vaccines is to decrease cost, and the cost reduction serves only to enrich entities and people who are vastly wealthy. The multi-billionaires of this world make a few extra thousand dollars a year because theyāve rolled back anti-mercury regulations.
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MERCURY DOES NOT NATURALLY OCCUR IN BREASTMILK. That claim is Midgely-Kettering bullshit of the highest degree. Mercury is found in breastmilk because of thousands of years of environmental pollution.* It serves no nutritive purpose, and is proven hazardous to child development. If we phased out mercury the way weāve been phasing out lead, weād see mercury levels in nursing mothers plummet. But instead, breastfeeding mothers and their children are being knowingly poisoned by anti-human corporations for profit. Itās exactly the same scenario as tetraethyl lead, and bOINGbOING and Anderson Cooper seem to be fighting on the side of the poisoners.
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This has nothing to do with autism. The purported link to autism seems conclusively disproven at this point. This is about unnecessarily exposing the most vulnerable population to mercury as a revenue-enhancing tool for billionaires. If weāre going to protect children from rapist priests, shouldnāt we protect them from corporate poisoners? Or are CEOs the new priesthood, allowed to victimize children for fun and profit?
I enjoy many of the features of this site, but this constant propagandizing in favor of mercury poisoning of children is frankly sickening. It literally makes my stomach roil. I donāt know how Anderson Cooper can sleep at night, carrying water for vermin like that. Heās at least as bad as this idiot Burton, in my opinion. Preying on children is vile, and defending mercury in vaccines and commercial products is disgusting.
* @shaddack corrects me to point out that there are also a few natural sources of mercury in the environment. This, to my mind, makes limiting exposure even more important.
Everything has a biological half-life. For metyl mercury it is said to be about 70 days.
Traces of mercury are in everything; in natural gas you can have enough to embrittle alloys of refinery piping.
There is also a natural source of mercury pollution in oceans, as studies on yellowfin tuna show.
Mercury In Ocean Fish May Come From Natural Sources, Not Pollution | ScienceDaily
Hydrothermal vents are suspected.
For terrestrial sources, there are also volcanoes, forest fires, and naturally occurring leachable mineral deposits. Then thereās the fossil fuels, namely coal. Volcanoes alone are said to be responsible for about half of atmospheric emissions.
So yes, you can have mercury-contaminated breast milk tens of thousands years ago in a fishing village nearby a hydrothermal vent, or in a volcanism-prone area. No man-made action needed.
Decreased cost equals increased availability, especially in the areas where a dollar can be way more than a full-day wage.
In negligible amounts, that are not repeated with any significant frequency, even a cumulative toxin wonāt be of much importance.
Maybe we need a āfish equivalent doseā, or how much mercury we get from one portion of a fish, to compare the other sources with? A variant of the ābanana equivalent doseā used for radiation?
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I forgot about volcanoes and forest fires, apologies. But thatās still not a valid reason to increase exposure; I think it strengthens the argument against unnecessary intentional exposure.
No, actually it doesnāt. We can afford to vaccinate every person on Earth without using any mercury, and if vaccination is worthwhile en masse as the people in these forums claim, thereās no reason not to do so with public monies. At this point any lack of availability of safe vaccines has been artificially created.
Au contraire, it shows that animals (including humans) can cope with sufficiently low doses of just about anything. Doubling the next-to-nil wonāt do much harm.
For some hard numbers, from here, a 6-oz (170 g) portion of fish can yield 4 Āµg of Hg for salmon, 60 Āµg for canned albacore tuna, and 170 Āµg for swordfish.
A 0.5mL dose of 0.01% thimerosal-stabilized vaccine is 25 micrograms of mercury.
Then thereās the other common domestic source to compare with, the CFL lamps. Their glass envelopes shatter easily when dropped (or when you try to salvage the phosphor for an experiment, but thatās another story).
There are also logistical issues. It is easier to ship and stock fewer multiple-use vials than the single-use ones. Then there are various added costs. And who will pay the additional money? Who will release them when it is about health for the poor instead of bombing the poor?
ā¦and then there is the factor that in many cases said poor subsist on fishing, which gives them enough mercury that the additional dose, which to add is in the less-bad ethyl mercury form, can be rounded off as unimportant.
Youāre using exactly the same argument as was used by Kettering and Midgely to defend lead.
Do you know that the effects of very low doses of mercury are actually not quantified yet? Check it out. Studies funded by different organizations show different results (just like tetraethyl lead all over again, surprise) but the US government and world health agencies acknowledge there are unconfirmed indications which are extremely difficult to study due to historical global contamination.
The Sloan-Kettering argument rests on the idea that since itās natural to be poisoned, therefore itās OK to increase the dose. Donāt worry, itās just a little bit, we can round off the numbers and itāll disappear magically! And here, look, we have reams of industry paperwork that shows that children are shot through-and-through with lead, er, I mean mercury, and nobody (who matters) gets (noticeably) harmed!
I cannot stomach that. My children are vaccinated. Without mercury. They donāt have any mercury-based dental amalgam in their mouths, either. My daughter loves sushi, but I limit her intake. Mercury is a poison and purposely taking it into your system is madness, as was amply demonstrated by hatters and alchemists. I wonāt unnecessarily risk my childrenās health so that corporate giants of nearly unimaginable wealth can make a few extra pennies from me.
Guns or butter, eh? I donāt want peopleās children to have less optimal lives simply so that Senator Pharmashill or Anderson Cooper can get bigger corporate handouts, but I also donāt want to have less safe medicine in order to pay for more bombs.
But, OK, the health effects of low doses are unquantified, and we consider corporate profits far more important than the possibility of human harm, so somebody has to pay for it. Fine, I WILL. Use my tax dollars. Charge me more for my food and fuel. I donāt care. Congress is already pumping my money into wealthy pharmaceutical corporations with far less justification.
