But the term “vaccine hesitancy” may seem less threatening, especially to people who are on the fence.
At this point, in 2019, after reports of thousands of deaths and outbreaks of preventable diseases, how many of these fence sitters are there really? And how many are just anti-vaxxers claiming hesitancy to avoid being called the idjits they are?
If there’s no harm in it, I have no problems with calling people whatever they want to be called. But there’s a fuckton of harm involved here and coddling them hasn’t worked over the last decade or so. Education campaigns, medical professionals, whatever. If anything, fence sitters have been increasingly going the other way instead. The ONLY thing that seems to have worked to get people to vaccinate their children are disease outbreaks, and it’s basically already too late by that point. The entire fucking point is to vaccinate BEFORE that happens.
So, fuck 'em. Until and unless they either vaccinate their damned weiner kids or, failing that, keeping them out of public spaces the ‘hesitant’, if they actually exist, can be lumped in with anti-vaxxers because that’s what they are. Giving them a better label certainly hasn’t fucking worked, so we can just stop pretending this is about politeness. :dubious:
Replace it with a link to Oxygen hesitancy.
Teach the controversy about breathing.
You know, just in case, maybe they should delay respiration for a few months, just until proper studies have been done to assure us that not only is oxygen essential for health, but that there are no possible side effects. Most people will breathe in many, many liters of air a day.
I’ve seen studies that have shown that people who breathe have heart attacks, cancer, disease, injury, and most oxygen breathers throughout history have even died, with only a small fraction still surviving.
What we need is a double blind study to get to the bottom of this.
Except Christian Scientists.
The Times today, in an article about the measles outbreak in Japan, noted that many of the victims were members of a small religion who opposed vaccination. And who changed their mind about it after the outbreak.
They got a better class of religion over there, don’t they?
There are parents who’ve been gulled into believing the “too many too soon” claim about immunizations and want a “slower” vaccine schedule, or to skip a certain vaccine (like hepatitis B for newborns).
“Vaccine hesitant” is not an unreasonable term for such people*, who may indeed respond to good information presented respectfully. They’re worth engaging with.
As noted earlier, I don’t use this designation for those who repeatedly drench you with a flood of false memes straight out of the antivax playbook, and who respond to refutation of these memes and discussion of solid science either by ignoring it or attacking you as a Pharma Shill (or both).
If one behaves like a hardcore antivaxer one deserves the label, disingenuous protests not withstanding.
*in my experience this term is utilized by health professionals and social science types, and is not a appellation customarily used by actual antivaxers.
Well, generally, but don’t forget they also have those loons who killed a dozen people and injured over a thousand in the 1995 Tokyo subway terror atrack.
One of my kids displayed some pretty bad reactions to vaccinations. He got them anyhow, his doctor did advocate spreading his out a bit and took extra caution with his schedule regarding combinations that could slightly raise the chance of a reaction. Reactions are a fuck ton better than measles!
He in fact did turn out to be autistic.
Now, I hold zero entertainment of the thought that vaccines were the cause.
I’m certain it’s inherited traits, and he displays a lot of the tendencies I did which had doctors suspecting I had aspergers.
I’ve personally experienced Redman syndrome.
I do have a sneaking suspicion that some genes that are associated with autism may imbue a sensitivity to any injections and it’s possible that this is the real impetus of these claims.
Or it could be random chance and people with similar experience just tying together a combination of random chance.
Either way, some temporary superficial reactions are no fucking excuse …any cursory look at the facts tell you get the goddamn vaccines !
The “too many too soon” argument is still antivax nonsense. They’re not hesitant. They’re antivax and they’e dangerous.
Also I think his doctor advocated spreading them out a bit mostly to make it possible to isolate the cause and offer an alternative form of any vaccine sharing that component if he did have a serious reaction, not so much to diminish the chances.
The real impetus of the claims is a lying SOB named Wakefield who perpetrated a fraud on the public.
This seems extremely unlikely - given the intense focus on investigating any link to autism, any correlation between autism and anything would have been picked up. Anything you are seeing anecdotally is almost certainly confirmation bias.
I would think maybe more like random coincidence…since I’d never even heard of this anti vax thing at the time and I’m all for vaccinations.
Though it’s basically impossible to find relevant data about harmless injection reaction rates in autistic children since everything is awash with debunking the causal nonsense.
Oh and don’t mistake my unconfirmed suspicion for being related to vaccine specifically, I experienced Redman syndrome from changing my saline bag to another saline bag. My kid gets hives from any and all injections.
Just thought maybe things like this are what helps support these idiots views, and it could maybe be possible that harmless reactions and existing autism correlate, or could be total coincidence.
Autism often (usually?) becomes apparent during the flurry of (completely necessary) vaccines children are supposed get, so there have long been people who assumed one was caused by the other. Intelligent, educated, and informed folks know that correlation does not equal causation, but not everyone falls into that category.
Funny - toilet training often occurs during that time span, yet I don’t ever recall hearing that toilet training cause autism.
Maybe vaccines cause toilet training lol
Yes, they do, as without them, there would be a not insignificant number of children that die before they reached toilet training age.
I like to point out that vaccines cause people to die of age related illnesses.
Yup, without vaccines, far fewer people would die of cancer.
Not only that, the number of deaths from road accidents, shark attacks and lightning strikes would reduce significantly.
Wake up, sheeple!
Vaccines cause adults.
Relevant to the discussion about trying to use sweet reason to appeal to antivaxers: a former bigwig at the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration (Cochrane is an independent group that does respected reviews of medical therapies) has backed out of an appearance at an antivax “workshop”.
Peter Gotsche recently was expelled from Cochrane leadership recently (he raised ire for attacking a review on the HPV vaccine, and has been drifting into weird polemics, such as referring to the pharma industry as “organized crime” and staging Scientology-like assaults on psychiatry). Leaders of the upcoming antivax workshop proudly announced he would be speaking in opposition to mandatory vaccination - then he decided to back out, supposedly after finding out the sort of cranks he’d be sharing the podium with. Interviewed subsequently, he had this to say:
*“It sounded interesting to take over, because I have the same basic point of view that they have in terms of not having to be compulsory or something you are forced to do. Then we are almost over in psychiatry – this is the only place you force people to do something against their will…
Peter Gøtzsche finds it difficult to understand why the “street parliament”, which he calls the high-spirited forces on social media, finds his participation in an event such as PIC’s problematic, because if one cannot speak to the skeptics, one cannot push them into the right direction either, he believes.
“I am still considering how to spread some light in the anti-vaccine darkness without even ending up in the gab,” says Gøtzsche."
But although Stinus Lindgreen shares Peter Gøtzsche’s view that vaccines should not be mandatory, he is far from agreeing that the way to “fight” the growing vaccine resistance is to speak somewhere like PIC’s workshop.
“The people who attend are not in doubt. They are opponents, and their attitude, I do not think you can make much sense of,” he says."*
Exactly.
You’ll get nowhere making nice with hardcore antivaxers and their disciples. Those who are less committed to mindlessly repeating the ideology may still be reachable.