Now how can I be a jerk when you already called me a fabulous person?
And here I was going to return the compliment and give you kudos for writing your book, even though people have apparently meanly called you names for saying things they disagree with and it seems to have rubbed off on you.
I am quite sure that an excess of love and kindness is not causing big problems for the world, and I am not ashamed of expressing my opinions or being “too nice” to any “morons.”
It is not loving or kind to treat adults like children and lie to them about science. It is certainly nice to allow people to spread nasty diseases to others.
Yeah, the book isn’t like that though… It doesn’t even have any pictures!
Wasn’t “Smug Obfuscator” a song by Sade?
Never did like that one much.
And this is the classic example of the immoral person who can’t think beyond his own immorality. People go on and on about what the real problem is, but he can’t fathom that they’d actually care all that much about the lives of other people, so it must be about money and influence.
This is about world health. The reason Sears is bad is not because he values money or influence, it’s because he’s putting this above world health. People are dying because he is giving legitimacy to a completely untenable position, one that has been scientifically debunked.
Seriously, dude. If you think this is about money, then fuck you.
Yeah.
FYI, I donated my share of the profits from the book to this organization.
By this time next year, we may see over a thousand dead from measles complications.
It’s that contagious.
Yep.
There’s a report of a measles case in Cook County, Illinois (that’s the Chicago area, folks - you know, big metropolitan center, LOTS of people…) Exposed is an ER, a clinic, and a grocery store. Officials are telling people who suspect they may have measles to NOT go to an ER but contact the health department. Now, if we had a proper herd immunity this wouldn’t be a huge issue but since the anti-vaxxers have been vomiting their stupidity these past few dozen years you just KNOW this is going to spread.
Shame, shame on those people.
I’d expect these situations to cause an increase in vaccination rates.
Hopefully adults also consider their own potential need of boosters.
[Moderating]
Saying “fuck you” to other posters is a violation of the Pit’s language rules. Please avoid doing this in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
How about the parents of the thirty babies under isolation in LA? Or this parent of a child who has leukemia and wants to stop the unvaccinated from potentially killing his kid? I wonder how they feel about Dr. Sears and his stupid thoughts on this subject? Can we stop fucking around here? Don’t vaccinate, fine. You face the consequences. This may include being barred from school or certain employment or just plain social ostracism. It should not include listening to your idiotic thoughts on this subject and the doctor who panders to people like that.
I know parents being scared not because they read some shit on the net and now fear “toxins,” but people who actually have to fear measles and other vaccine preventable illnesses because of such idiots. That’s really what turns some people into non-human beings. They get sacrificed so that idiots can be heard and courted.
She only has five books published. A quick google would have answered this far quicker than I could. Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent’s Guide
She’s…another problematic author. (She’s also a very lovely person, who I have met and thoroughly enjoy, and the author of other books that I like very much.) She promotes a lot of myths in her book, particularly the ones that say vaccine preventable illnesses have a “natural life cycle” which created a decline that simply coincided with vaccination, and that sanitation was responsible for the declining mortality of vaccine preventable illnesses, not vaccines. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, but those are the two that stick out in my memory as things I learned from her book that turn out to be wrong.
She, like Sears, isn’t straight out anti-vax, but her book is used by a lot of antivaxxers to encourage others to become antivaxxers.
That’s an important point. Apparently the patient in the Chicago instance is an adult, so maybe that person wasn’t vaccinated or maybe it was a matter of waning immunity and need of a booster.
That’s another reason to vaccinate as many people as possible, not everyone is going to have a good response to the vaccine so they, too, would benefit from herd immunity.
Another stupid thing is a sort of resistance on the part of doctors to adults needing boosters for childhood illness vaccines. I think part of it was that back in the day a vaccinated adult typically still came into contact with people with the disease, acting as a natural booster so immunity didn’t degrade back then as it does now. While there are tests for whether or not immunity still exists (“titer”) there’s a cost associated with doing them, as with any medical test, and if insurance doesn’t cover it then the patient has to bear the cost, which might be an issue for a lot of people. Or we could just give folks a booster after X number of years - but, again, that hasn’t been the norm so I doubt US insurance would cover it, and full price on vaccinations may be a problem for the working poor.
Jesus, dude, they covered this issue in My Little Pony. No, seriously. Friendship is Magic, Season 4, episode 16, where the aesop moral was pretty damn obvious - sometimes, being nice to people and letting them do what they want hurts them in the long run. Go watch it, it might help inform you about reality. Yes, the show with the freakin’ magic talking horses.
When we’re too nice to morons, those morons get it in their heads that what they’re doing is something acceptable or decent. It’s not. Choosing not to vaccinate your child is not okay. Choosing to “hide in the herd” is not okay. Compromising the incredible strides made in abolishing these infectious diseases out of sheer bloody-mindedness and inability to understand science is not okay. Being this bitch (the only difference between her and the typical anti-vaxxer is intent) is not okay.
It needs to be a social sin not to have your child vaccinated. People afraid of toxins should be just as afraid of being drummed out of every social interaction they’re a part of. It should be a social sin on a similar order of magnitude to saying “Oh, you know, I fuck barnyard animals” when asked about your hobbies at a mixer. When you hear “Oh, I don’t vaccinate”, your immediate response should be “Are you serious? What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you freely admit this? You’re an idiot, stay away from my child you Typhoid-Mary-enabling sicko.” Of course, people who fuck goats at least have the decency not to make life worse for the rest of us. It’s weird, but it doesn’t hurt other people. Antivaxxers don’t even have that pleasant distinction.
This is Dr. Jay Gordon. He’s Jenny McCarthy’s pediatrician. Yeah that Jenny.
This is what he had to say today:
I asked who she was with the assumption that your answer would include why you brought her up, which it did.
It’s interesting that you have met her and describe her as a lovely person. My non-vaxxing friends are also lovely people. The idea that the proper reaction to them is insulting them, shunning them, rage, and hostility and that any actual children in question should be quarantined as collateral damage is crazy. I’m not going to purposely participate in creating a hostile environment for anyone out of whatever misguided sense leads someone to think that’s a great idea.
When one encounters members of a group only in the context of them insulting, being hostile and threatening you because they disagree with your stance on a topic, writing off the whole group as assholes who need to be insulted, ignored, and punished is the obvious choice.
I’m sure if I encountered LavenderBlue under neutral circumstances, she would not behave hostilely or call me names either. It’s easy to write off a group of nameless faceless “bad guys” that must be stopped from indirectly harming others at any cost, but if you encounter actual nice people, talking to them like human beings makes more sense. When someone says “I’m worried about what effect some of the chemicals in the vaccination could have on my baby. My friend’s baby died after getting vaccinated and I’m scared,” I’m not an asshole for not ordering them out of my home. What kind of a crazy fucked-up dystopia holds that up as the standard?
No, I’m not watching your stupid pony cartoon for “life lessons.”
Trying to give preschoolers life-lessons via stories is to give them a head start on learning things that they haven’t actually been around long enough to notice for themselves yet. Since I have been living in the actual real world for decades, there is no useful information for me in preschool programming.
No matter how much time you’ve spent crouched in front of Care Bears or Teletubbies or whatever in your mom’s basement, any lessons that haven’t sunken in yet never will. It’s time to put away the footy-jammies, cast aside your binky, come above ground. The sun is pretty bright and the ponies don’t talk, but you’ll get used to it.
The point was that the lesson that cartoon gives is smarter than many adults that follow pseudoscience or that are not willing to learn something new. And it is the same lesson that grown ups with authority are telling us.
Like I said… 
True story: Once I had to setup a virtual machine in a Linux environment and the best teacher I found for a step that was giving me trouble was a little kid explaining it better than many adults did on an internet video. The point here is that even seemingly childish things have great lessons, and the best entertainment for kids usually does riff of what expert adults tell to others or to the kids.
That is nice, but you are only being contradictory. Are you giving advice to others and **omitting **the anti-vaxxers that should go out to learn better or remain crouched to their plushy toys? You are only defending efforts to protect them from inconvenient information or regulations.
Are you kidding me with this crap?
This isn’t a disagreement. This isn’t how you feel about something. This is deliberate refusal to engage in public health measures to prevent the spread of a dangerous and contagious disease. I’m not interested in hearing from someone who is so stupid that she thinks vaccines contain dangerous chemicals and kill people. I’m interested in making sure she doesn’t infect other people with something that could kill people.
Really.
I don’t give a shit that you think that you can make nice-nice with measles by washing your hands or eating organic and not being one of those filthy third worlders who don’t really matter. I’m interested in making sure that that you don’t infect me or my family or my kids with measles or any other vaccine-preventable disease.
You refuse vaccines? You want to act like a child who wants to pretend he can do whatever he wants without consequences? Okay. Fine. When there’s a measles outbreak you go sit the corner. You stay there while the grownups combat it. You get a time out not because we’re big meany poopy heads. You get one so your kid and my kid and the neighbor with cancer don’t get preventable diseases.
That’s not discrimination. That’s not a dystopia. That’s not writing people off. It’s protecting public health. You are fucked up and so are the people you are so pitifully defending.
Would anyone care for some shingles? One of my medical fears is that I’ll end up with shingles one day because I was That Kid in kindergarten who came down with chicken pox first and gave it to the whole class. And then I brought it home and gave it to Oldest Sister who was fifteen. That was thirty years ago and she still hasn’t forgiven me.