Toni and David McCaffery lost their four-week-old daughter, Dana, to whooping cough in 2009. She contracted the disease and died before she was old enough to be vaccinated.
Then the harassmentbegan. On the day before her funeral, an anti-vaccination group called the local health authorities to demand Dana’s records. The McCafferys received anonymous letters blaming them for Dana’s death (arguing that Vitamin K would have saved her, for instance). Antivaxxers posted angry screeds on Dana’s memorial website. Pamphlets arguing that Dana died of something else keep arriving in the mail. This has kept up now for years.
Other parents have been harassed as well. A man who had just lost his seven-year-old son to chicken pox received a call from an anti-vaccinationist who informed him that his son was the weakest of the herd and not meant to survive. A woman who lost her 12-year-old daughter to complications from measles in infancy got harassing mail similar to the McCafferys.
There will always be lunatics out there, and I suppose that if it weren’t vaccines, they presumably would have latched on to some other nonsense. The sheer absence of empathy and human feeling, however, makes me marvel that these people can function in society at all.
Compare to some of the (there’s no other word) nutty reaction to the Sandy Hook parents. They’re EXPLOITING their TRAGEDY to KILL other kids and TAKE AWAY OUR FREEDOM! At least the anti-vaccine crowd aren’t saying these parents are “crisis actors.”
I’m not sure when we turned the corner to the street where people’s loss of loved ones became an open target for public scorn and harassment, but every instance of it and every new clot of nuts who take up the practice make me want to go get my crowbar.
By their own reasoning, you should. After all, if their pro-disease stance should lead someone to beat them to death with a crowbar, clearly they were too weak and not meant to survive.
OTOH, the anti-vaccine crowd actively pursues a course of action that increases the frequency of diseases like Whooping Cough and Measles. Then they attack the families of children killed by these diseases? Wow.
Wait, I’m confused. Wouldn’t anti-vaxxers be.. Well, glad isn’t the word, but at least unsurprised that this happens? Wouldn’t they assume that the kids hadn’t been vaccinated, and thus the parents are on “their” side? What purpose does this behavior serve??
And yes, I realize I’m trying to ascribe logic to the indefensible, but I’m just damned curious.
The absence of empathy and human feelings clearly shows that they have not evolved properly and as such they should be culled from the herd to prevent their inferior genes from being passed on.
I think that the reasoning, such as it is, is that whooping cough and the like don’t actually exist, they’re just part of the evil conspiracy to try to corrupt our precious bodily fluids with mind-control chemicals. Thus, if someone claims that their daughter died of whooping cough, they must just be part of the conspiracy.
I admit that I am unsure as to the best way to fight back against this sort of idiocy.
That’s what I’m getting stuck on, too. I guess if they admit that their lunacy will result in dead kids, then they might have to adjust their lunacy, and that ain’t gonna happen.
You ain’t the only one, sister. This has me scratchin’ my noggin too. If they think the parents did not vaccinate and that the death(s) were natural selection, why harass the grieving? It serves no purpose other than making them look like an asshole.
My WAG is because many anti-vaxxers are trying to claim that measles, whooping cough, etc., aren’t that big of a deal, a dead unvaccinated kid is bad for that message.
I thought I read that the particular families in the OP were using their experience to push against anti-vaccination propaganda? Surely that would explain everything?
Yes, and in a rudimentary sense, it does explain why. What it doesn’t explain, I think, is how someone might conclude that harassing the parents of a dead baby might be anything other than counter-productive and inhumane.
With all the anti- and pseudo-science, the rampant belief in homeopathy and other woo-woo treatments, and the belief in the wildest of conspiracies, we seem to be marching steadily backwards into the Dark Ages. This seems to be just fine with a certain segment of our population, who apparently would prefer a return to chaos, robber barons and mob mentality. It’s beyond my comprehension. What has happened to placing a high value on education, scientific method and logical thinking?
