You are the one claiming that vulnerable people should be isolated. You say so right here!
Fun fact: I took the GMAT, got a perfect score, and was offered a test prep job at the facility on the spot. Rather than signing up for “reading comprehension lessons,” I’d therefore be the one teaching them!
Yes, isolate the kids and the parents. It’s totally legal. What the hell is the problem here? This is what you do in the event a vaccine-preventable disease breaks out. Yes, my friend Stacy’s son Ben also gets isolated in such cases. You can imagine how this infuriates her that her son has to put up with this kind of nonsense because people are deliberately choosing to be dumb and refusing vaccines.
I certainly hope you don’t use this thread as an example of your supposedly higher order thinking skills. You repeatedly slam the critics of Dr. Sears for the most minor of errors and then repeatedly defend him when he makes much bigger ones. You seem to be under the lunatic delusion that our vaccine program should be about attempting to reason with morons who don’t give a shit if eight hundred people die of measles each year just so they can promote their idiotic pet theories and sell junk.
Hmmm, no…
I quite clearly stated my belief that reasoning with unreasonable people is useless.
I have “slammed” no critics of Sears. Indeed, I have no doubt that your hero Dr. Offit is an intelligent scholar with the public interest at heart, and have said as much.
You’re just ranting, so I suppose you’re in the right place!
Your TV doesn’t present a realistic risk to my child. If you don’t secure your TV, I can accept that risk, or keep my child out of your home, or sue your ass off if your TV harms my child.
If refusing vaccines only presented a risk to the unvaccinated child, I’d still think the parent an idiot (like the parent who doesn’t secure their TV) but I wouldn’t think they needed to be forced with any consequences other than the potential maiming or death of their own child. (Others would disagree with me, saying that the state has an interest in that child’s welfare, even if the parent isn’t interested.)
Meanwhile, for everyone who might be interested back here in the land of reality, here are the explanations I’ve seen offered by the vaccine denialist cult on social media for the current outbreak of measles:
The vaccinated caused it (by “shedding” bits of the virus from vaccines).
Only the vaccinated are getting sick (they say this with every outbreak, in spite of statistics to the contrary).
The vaccine is worse than the disease (their fallback argument)>
The outbreak isn’t happening (they also claim the Ebola epidemic isn’t happening - it’s a lie propagated by the U.N. and the New World Order).
The government sprayed Disneyland with chemtrails containing the measles virus (I can’t even).
At this point, I personally believe that waiting for the vaccine denialist cult to “come around” is a lost cause. We’ve tried education (and obviously will continue those efforts) but it’s time for different strategies. I personally am supportive of the West Virginia and Mississippi models, which do not allow non-medical exemptions for vaccinations for public schools. I support doing away with all religious and personal exemptions for vaccinations for public and private schools.
One “good” thing that may come out of this latest outbreak is that pro-science parents who understand that vaccines are good will finally start to speak as loudly as the anti-vaccine movement, and stop tolerating the anti-vaccine propaganda.
Parents, however supposedly well-meaning and loving they are, do not get to endanger their children’s lives in the service to a whacked-out philosophy.
I’ll throw in my two cents’ worth on this measles vaccine thing. I had the German measles (rubella) in 6th grade. I was very measly looking, but felt fine and got a week off of school therefore.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I had the regular old measles (rubeola). I swear I have never felt sicker in my life!! I missed a week of school that time too, and lost about 15 pounds. *If there are anti-vaxers who think anyone should just get the measles instead of a vaccination because it’s just a mild childhood disease, *they’re fucking insane!!!
Exactly… I am most interested in my own child’s welfare, also interested in my child friends and relatives and children of friends, and less interested (though still interested) in the welfare of children who are complete strangers to me.
I’m not more concerned about strangers who are the kids of smart people dying from other people’s negligence than strangers who are the kids of negligent parents dying, and I see no logical reason why I should be.
If children were property of some sort, then I’d agree with your logic… Not to imply that you believe children are property; I’m sure you do not.
Discussion: The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.
Kevin Drum: [INDENT]The internet is all about communication, and it does two things in this case. First, it empower the anti-vax nutballs, giving them a far more powerful medium for spreading their nonsense. On the flip side, it makes a lot more people vulnerable to bad information. If you lack the context to evaluate arguments about vaccination, the internet is much more likely to make you dumber about vaccinating your kids than any previous medium in history.
… I’m not trying to make a broad claim that the internet is making us generally stupider or anything like that. But it’s a far more powerful medium for spreading conspiracy theories and other assorted crap than anything we’ve had before. If you lack the background and context to evaluate information about a particular subject, you’re highly likely to be misinformed if you do a simple Google search and just start reading whatever comes up first. And that describes an awful lot of people. [/INDENT] We tend to emphasize the most extreme anti-vax proponents here. But I assume there’s a much larger group of people without firm beliefs who nonetheless feel uncomfortable with vaccination to the point of postponing a trip to the pediatrician or clinic to get the kid his shots.
As Drum noted, some lack the context to evaluate information or separate out conspiracy nuts or assorted crackpots. They can’t distinguish expertise from pseudo-expertise and sometimes statements by various authority figures only adds to their paranoia. It’s a puzzle, not limited to the US. And it can at times affect the highly educated, though I have to assume/hope that English majors are more susceptible than STEM folks.
I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to be a pain in the ass here. But I just cannot parse this post. Could you try rephrasing it, so I don’t end up creating a strawman to argue against?
Do you just not get that the effectiveness of the vaccine in your child, in your child’s friends, and in the children of your friends and relatives depends in part on the herd immunity that is only developed when the vast majority of the population is vaccinated?
I will try.
As is typical, my own child’s well-being and safety is more important to me than than the well-being of all other children.
Next in the hierarchy are other children that I know and care about.
Third are children that are complete strangers.
Of course I get the most control over the safety of my own child. I can bolt my TV to the wall properly and get vaccinations. If I’m extremely concerned, I can even get titers done for some diseases to confirm immunity and get extra boosters accordingly.
I have little say in the safety of the next tier, but I can attempt to exert some influence or help bolt TVs to the wall.
The third tier children, children that are strangers… Well, I’d rather none die, of course, but if I happen to see on the news or whatever that a tot has died, what’s it to me if he died from measles because he was infected by an unvaccinated child even though he was vaccinated himself or if he was smashed by an unsecured TV? As far as I’m concerned, both deaths should have been preventable, but actually the TV smashing death was actually more preventable, since people don’t put up such a fuss about how attaching the TV to the wall might harm their child, so we ought to be able to at least cut down on THOSE deaths, because who is even fighting against it? Instead, they apparently increase drastically every year.
In both cases, a random child has died because of an adult’s negligence. Neither child was property, but a person unto themselves. I don’t care more about protecting the vaccinated child than unvaccinated children.
Do you not get that your proposed methods (the full of lies Dr. Sears’s schedule and advertising) are both ineffective and likely to do nothing more than increase the number of anti-vaxers?