As a member of the herd who can’t get flu shots, I thank you for doing so.
I got part 2 of Shingrix yesterday at CVS. Been sore and achy from neck to toes ever since, barely slept, moaning and groaning.
But I tell myself: “It’s better than shingles! SOOOO much better.”
It is. Because this will pass, whereas shingles can cause post-herpetic pain that goes on for months or years.
Anyone know Rockland County, New York–part of the New York City Metropolitan Area?
Not exactly poverty stricken.
Well:
The Forward was reporting on similar issues last spring:
The tragic irony of a racist Jew. There are no words.
There are words. From Avenue Q.
Yeah, racism among (white) Jews is not noticeably rarer than among (white) Christians. See also: Yiddish racial slurs such as schvartzer.
Wow! My ignorance has been fought. When I was a kid, childhood diseases like measles were commonplace and as far as I can tell, having them was the norm and it’s not having had several of them that was the anomaly. And nobody was paying much attention to them. I had assumed it was still the case.
But from what I read about these outbreaks, it seems that catching measles is now considered unusual and a significant health concern. I had no idea.
And looking up, I see that those vaccines were introduced in 1971, when I was 6. And that the massive number of cases went down almost immediately to almost none.
Which makes me thing that about 8 years ago, I caught one of these childhood disease. In my mind it was unusual for an adult, but I didn’t have the slightest clue that such an infection had in fact become a rarity in the general population, children included. Well…I was just functioning with assumptions that had been outdated for 45+ years…
Even worse, he’s wrong. Mexico blows the US away in measles vaccination rates. If anything, we’re the dirty, disease ridden filth giving immigrants diseases.
Same here. But just because the incidence of serious complications from measles, say, was quite low didn’t mean it didn’t cause a lot of needless suffering and danger:
So pre-vaccine, you had about a one-in-ten-thousand chance of dying from measles and a one-in-a-hundred chance of being hospitalized from it. Rare enough to be accepted as a comparatively minor risk, but common enough to do a lot of damage in the aggregate.
KooKooKaaKaa for sure but you have to give her credit for using the verb “looses” correctly. Also for not using it to spell “loses”.
ETA: Looks like I fell for zombie trickery. I responded to something from a few years ago.
If you want to get an idea for the episode, here is a short clip of the intro that is commonly spread online. It very viscerally drives the point home.
Low vaccine uptake is a problem affecting many Waldorf schools.
*"Waldorf schools have their foundations in anthroposophy, which the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America defines as “the belief that humanity has the wisdom to transform itself and the world, through one’s own spiritual development.”…many of the kids that go to the 250 Waldorf schools in North America are not vaccinated, including schools with some of the highest vaccine exemption rates in the country, including:
Waldorf School of Mendocino County (California) – 79.1% vaccine exemption rate
Tuscon Waldorf Schools (Arizona) – 69.6% vaccine exemption rate
Waldorf School of San Diego (California) – 63.6% vaccine exemption rate
Orchard Valley Waldorf School (Vermont) – 59.4% MMR vaccine exemption rate
Whidbey Island Waldorf School (Washington) – 54.9% vaccine exemption rate
Austin Waldorf School (Texas) – 48% vaccine exemption rate
That shouldn’t be a surprise, as anthroposophical medicine “attempts to mix the theories and practices of real medicine with quack cures, physical and artistic therapies and biographical counseling” and “their anti-vaccination stance derives from a dangerous and ignorant belief in diseases being something you must go through to strengthen the soul in its present incarnation.”"*
From the OP’s link:
*"In the 1980s, Sullivan was working as a nurse in Johns Hopkins oncology unit when she witnessed chickenpox claim the life of an elementary school-age girl.
The girl, whom Sullivan didn’t name, had just finished a leukemia treatment and returned to her home when she came in contact with somebody who had chickenpox.
“Because her immune system was brand spanking new, the disease spread to her internal organs, and she did not survive,” Suillivan said. “That was a wake up call to me that this is not a benign childhood illness.”…
“It’s not just about you,” Sullivan said. “It’s about the people you interact with: Pregnant women, people with AIDS, people finishing chemo. They’re a part of our community, too, and we have to do what we can to protect everybody.”"*
Uh-oh. If there’s anything antivaxers hate, it’s the suggestion that having one’s kids properly vaccinated is a civic duty (there’s even an antivax film sneeringly titled “The Greater Good”).
The fascinating thing is the anti-vaxxers will simply ignore the evidence as usual, and double down on their “belief.” The more they see innocents suffering the harder they hang on to this nonsense.
In my neighborhood, there’s an anarchist bookstore that hosts a needle exchange for opioid addicts. I love the idea, but have some serious problems with the implementation.
For one thing, they have no medical professionals on staff, nor (AFAICT) do any of the members have any plan to obtain medical skills. For another, they don’t allow the users a space to use, because they don’t want that kind of trouble in their shop; instead, users get needles and go to the nearest unsupervised location, which during many hours is the school playground nearby. For another thing, they dishonestly represent the danger presented by used discarded needles, belittling and dismissing the concerns of parents who are worried about their kid finding and being stuck by a needle on that playground. For another thing, they refuse to organize a needle clean-up program, although they magnanimously offer to tell others how they can conduct one.
A lot of local folks have complained about the program, and it’s on the verge of being shut down.
How is this relevant? Because that anarchist bookstore is less than 500 feet away from the goddamned Waldorf school in that article above. And the danger from the needles from the exchange program is eclipsed–ECLIPSED–by the danger from the needles that are NOT injecting vaccines into those same kids. Parents up in arms about the needle exchange ought to be waving torches and pitchforks at the Waldorf School, whose parents are using their children to breed contagious diseases.
I love a lot about this town, but goddamn.
Got mine last Thursday. It was free and I got to get it during work hours.
This is the first time that they asked everyone to sit on a chair for ten minutes afterwards ‘in case of dizziness’. They were also suggesting getting in on your dominant side, because the extra movement was supposed to ease the soreness faster. No idea whether that is true or not. There was no soreness, not even any sting when the liquid went in.
New York! Thank you. I’ve seen a couple of news updates on my phone that only say Rockland County, with no clue which state. One update said that County Health was recommending that schools require unvaccinated students stay home until 21 days after the last new case is discovered. Have not heard how that went over.
More on the wonderful wacky world of Waldorf schools, and the philosophy that disease is good for you (spiritually, anyway):
Updating my post of three weeks ago with 33 cases in Rockland County, New York:
I’ll just put this here.