Oh so you’ve met my cousins?
The funny thing is that my cousins who are fully into the anti-vax and were since before COVID are the ones that in other ways I get on with best. Sigh.
It’s not just a problem in the U.S.:
Two gems from RFK Jr.'s antivax organization “Children’s Health Defense”:
CHD is currently on a Twitter rampage against prophylactic vitamin K intramuscular injections in newborns, a routine and extremely safe practice to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding internally, including potentially catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage causing brain damage and death. CHD is trying to scare parents away from this lifesaving measure, claiming falsely that it’s dangerous.
Headline from a story on the CHD website: “Gates-Funded Plan to Vaccinate 86 Million Girls Against HPV Will ‘Unleash Mass Casualty Event,’ Critic Says”*
Good to know that CHD is happy to see African women die of cervical cancer and other maligncies linked to HPV.
Young voters supporting RFK Jr. in polls: your idol is a promoter of death on a major scale.
*in case you were wondering, this “critic” is James Lyons-Weiler, who postures as an “objective, pro-vaccine rational scientist” but claims vaccination causes autism and has referred to vaccines as “filthy, nasty vials of toxic sludge”. Remember, it’s mean and unfair to refer to him and RFK Jr. as antivaxers, no matter what they say and do.
How about √2? “Squares” for short.
Irrational.
Just when you think antivaxers can’t go any lower, they exceed expectations. From a blurb for the new propaganda film “Shot Dead”:
“Hear from the families brave enough to speak up and admit that the shot killed their children. Hear from the ones who have refused to keep quiet. We all know that there are so many who have sold out to pharma, denying that their loved ones were hurt or killed by the shots.”
How nice, accusing grieving parents and other relatives of being pharma shills.
For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a “medical freedom” group…
Until the Mississippi ruling, the state was one of only six that refused to excuse students from vaccination for religious or philosophical reasons. Similar legal challenges have been filed in the five remaining states: California, Connecticut, Maine, New York and West Virginia. The ultimate goal, according to advocates behind the lawsuits, is to undo vaccine mandates entirely, by getting the issue before a Supreme Court that is increasingly sympathetic to religious freedom arguments.
I think the religious exemption should be eliminated in all states.
It’s hard to find any commonly practiced religion that out-and-out opposes vaccination*; therefore religious exemptions are typically bogus.
*with the exception of some faith-healing denominations like End Time Ministries.
Ok quick. Can anyone name an actual religion that disallows vaccination?
The ultimate goal, according to advocates behind the lawsuits
… is to insure as many children die of communicable disease as possible
I was sure that Christian Science does, but I was wrong.
And directly from their organization:
So no, they don’t disallow them.
I’ll bet half those cases are in Arizona.
People out here are getting Whooping Cough fer cryin out loud.
I used to work at a museum where I’d get to play docent for school children. My favorite exhibit was our amputation kit from circa 1880, and I’d talk to the kids about medicine and diseases during the Civil War that killed more soldiers than bullets or artillery. As part of my spiel, I’d tell the students about diseases they didn’t have to worry about, like Whooping Cough, until one year a student said, “One of our classmates had that” and several others nodded in agreement. I was flabbergasted at the time, but it turns out Arkansas was in the middle of a sharp increase in cases. In 2011 we had 80 cases, it was 248 in 2012, and in 2013 it reached 455. I had to amend my presentation from then on.
When I learned that someone in my Tai chi class was out due to Whooping Cough and that I couldn’t remember the last time I had a Tdap, I went right to the pharmacy to get one. When I told the very nice shot giver why I needed the shot…his face turned some odd colors while he tried to stay calm and quiet while expressing his outrage about a perfectly preventable disease becoming an issue again.
I didn’t bring measles up, he was getting ready to stab my arm with a sharp pointy thing, no reason to upset him further.
My pediatrician sister-in-law’s practice started requiring that all their patients be vaccinated (if medically safe) after a baby died of whooping cough. This was with a very wealthy clientele in a very wealthy region. They actually had very little pushback. The parents didn’t need much persuading when they saw how adamant the doctors were and why.
Bolding mine.
My maternal grandmother was one of six children. Only three lived to adulthood. One infant brother died of diptheria, and an almost adult brother died of whooping cough. The third died the day after he was born, his mother had some fever while carrying him. He’d looked healthy so nobody expected it,I’m told. He had a twin who was red, scrawny, and, according to what my grandmother was told, he looked like a little red prune. But he and my grandmother were the two youngest.
This grandmother was the one who told me, when I was in high school, that she didn’t believe in "the good old days. Modern medicine was one of the reasons, she lost two pregnancies of her own. And she did love air conditioning, fridges, washing machines and so on.
Your grandmother was a very smart woman!
I just cannot understand the disconnect between taking daily blood pressure meds and refusing to get vaccinated.
COVID has taught me some pretty ugly things about myself. I don’t care if hubs dies of COVID, I just don’t want it to be a long drawn out thing because I have no plans to drive to town every day for him again. I don’t care if anti-vax people die of anything preventable, I will just be mad about them blithely spreading it here and yon until they can’t walk anymore.
If they wanna be selfish, I’m going to be selfish too.
I went back to college in my late 20s and was required to get my MMR shot as I hadn’t had one in quite a while. My mother tried to talk me out of it, urging me to claim religious exemption. Which was odd because she never had a problem getting me vaccinated when I was a kid, and, oh yeah, she was a nurse at the time she urged me to not get vaccinated. The university gave me the vaccination in their clinic at no cost.
This is the thing. It’s about cultural memory. People old enough to remember the “bad ol’ days” can’t get their shots fast enough.
But from about Gen-X on down, the cultural memory gets weaker, and anecdotal people (people who rely on anecdote not data) have trouble getting their heads around anything that neither they nor their family nor their workmate’s cousin’s best friend have been through.