I do know someone. I don’t know all the details, but she has two kids who are both significantly disabled by autism, as it happens. I’m not sure if they had a diagnosis of it before stopping vaccines with the older one, or if it was a coincidence that she delayed vaccines and then found out her child had autism. But she has mentioned that the older boy was in the hospital multiple times with illnesses that might have been prevented by vaccines, and after that, she put the younger child on a regular vaccine schedule. (She noted that he already had autism and was having seizures, so she wasn’t exactly worried that vaccines would cause those problems at that point.) So anyway, nowadays she’s fairly pro-vax.
I didn’t have a kid get sick, but I had been using Sears’s alternate schedule. Then I read Offit’s criticism of it, and was like, “Man, that was wrong. Back to the CDC schedule for us!” But I am unusually open to rational critiques of my dumb beliefs. Most anti-vax people just assume Offit is The Devil and discount anything he says.
For those interested in this, Refutations of Anti-Vaccine Memes is a pretty cool Facebook group. They circulate pithy, high-impact images that counter the similar pictures anti-vaxers put out over social media.
Infection rates vs complications is a good measure.
We don’t get immunized against stuff like typhus in the US because it’s not much of an issue.
We also don’t immunize against polio or smallpox because we don’t get cases of those here anymore.
Yes, that’s rather the point. Your “natural” immunity is the same as one derived from a vaccine. A vaccine is designed to get your body to recognize a disease and develop a defense against it. Some vaccines do lose effectiveness eventually, but we also lose our naturally derived immunity too (see Shingles).
Maybe if you’re a sadist.
The common cold has no associated vaccine.
The flu? Are you deliberately a fucking idiot? In an average year, hundreds of thousands of people die of the flu. If we could immunize everybody every year, that number could be slashed.
What kind of idiot asshole laughs at a deadly fucking disease that kills hundreds of thousands in a “good” year and tens of millions in a bad year?
Well…if you have that attitude, I won’t be getting immunized anyway, always been healthy without them, and furthermore, for your vitriol I hope you and yours catch the flu from me and perish, ya dickhole.
So were the majority of people who died of the Spanish flu, or the Native people who died from smallpox. It doesn’t matter how healthy you’ve been in the past if you cross paths with the wrong bacterium or virus.
What you got was lucky. A lot of that ‘luck’ was probably due to the immunity of those around you who were civic-minded and got their vaccinations. Too many people think like you do and we get outbreaks, and people die.
Plus there’s a disease like chickenpox which later in life inflicts shingles on a large percentage of people (50% in one study) who had chickenpox. This is a disease that can damage your eyesight, or maybe just cause burning, excruciating pain for weeks or months or longer. That fucking virus hides out in your own nervous system for 50 years or so after your case of chickenpox and then resurfaces to make your life misery.
Oh, and a big reason you get vaccinated? So you don’t pass it on to those who are too young or too immunocompromised to get the vaccine.
Vaccination works. We have only exterminated two infectious diseases, smallpox and rinderpest. The former was through vaccination. The latter through vaccination and killing the infected - it’s a cattle disease.
Polio has gone from a worldwide plague to under 1000 cases per year (in, IIRC, 5-7 countries), and may even be wiped out in our lifetime. This is because of intensive, multinational, multi-organizational efforts.
Vaccination fucking works, and we are insanely lucky to be living in a time where this is even a debate.
Nothing like deliberate, willful, and avoidable ignorance combined with a complete contempt for the health and well being of your fellow man.
I’d come up with a pithy insult, but I think that sums it up quite well. I, for one, hope you and everybody around you beats the odds and not spread or contract any preventable diseases, though it’s likely verging on certain it’s too late for that.
One of which has been eliminated from natural spread altogether worldwide. Think of that, a disease that helped destroy the civilizations of the New World, itself gone.
But alas the worldwide eradication of polio has been getting thwarted by various dolts who have spread rumors in the developing countries that it’s some sort of nefarious conspiracy from the Westerners.
That was not a rude post. Even if it were, one rude post is hardly a good reason to decide not to take steps against getting diseases which could seriously harm or kill you and other people. Sorry, grandad, that I passed the flu on to you and didn’t even try to stop it, but someone on the internet was mean to me!
You also just wished death on another poster. That might not go so well for you.
[Moderating] AnthonyElite, wishing harm or death on other posters is a violation of the boards rules. Please avoid doing this in the future.
[/Moderating]
Well, not quite true. I had influenza type B (which I have no idea what it is exactly) about 20 years ago, but I don’t go get the flu shots. I’m not part of any of the groups likely to get it and since I’m allergic to all kinds of things, I avoid unnecessary shots.
Which leads into my question. I am not pro- or anti-vax, since I have no kids to have jabbed and never will. That out of the way, why are the measles such a big deal these days? When I was a kid during the Bronze Age, they gave the rubella shot to women planning on having children but the measles (“soft” measles) had no shot and I don’t think kids were given the rubella shot. (That’s the “german measles”, right?) Pretty much all of my friends in grade school got the measles, were out of school for a couple of days and that was that. What happened?
