I sense a business opportunity here…
My god. I just skipped over to mothering dot com for the first time ever. I think I lost IQ points.
Well, as long as you lost them naturally.
You WHAT?! Why on earth would you do such a thing?
Yea, there are several posters here who’ve attempted to engage in reasonable discussion over there, with abject failure as the result. Posting ANYTHING that’s supportive of vaccines gets you banned over there.
They are cumstains, that’s what’s with them.
I’d put a badger in the esophagus of any one of these and hope it reaches the sinus before eating it’s way out of (for the ladies) yeast hole (for the fellas) tooth-and-claw enlarged ass.
When I was a kid, people used to try to get their kids infected with the Pox before they got too old. I never got it. According to my OB, I was immune (but I never had a shot or the disease). Apparently some people are naturally immune.
When my son was vaccinated for it, I let the nurse jab my arm with the vaccine, too, just because I felt sorry for him. I cannot for the life of me imagine trying to purposely infect the kid with chicken pox. That one is a doozy.
Well, yeah, it’s stated in their rules:
Welcome To The New Mothering Dot Community | Mothering Forum
Hell, we did it with our daughter at the behest of my sister, a Duke-trained physician whose kid had chicken pox. Sophie got a very minor case of it.
Mailing the stuff is bloody bizarre, but I don’t get the OMFG-ness of the idea of the chicken pox party (never heard that term before this thread, btw).
No, I’m saying that if you want to talk about vaccines in a positive way, period. They don’t just ban people for trying to discuss mandatory vaccination, they ban them for anything other than the “vaccines are TEH EBIL!” party line.
The vaccine just came out when my kids were 2 and 7. At that time (according to my kids’ doctor) they weren’t sure if it would give life long coverage and there was some concern that if they got the vaccine it might wear off at a more dangerous age to be sick. I never had to decide because they both got chicken pox before they had a chance to get the vaccine. I think it was recommended to me to get them vaccinated if they didn’t get it naturally by a certain age that I don’t remember now.
But now I would definitely get it for them. It’s possible some of the older moms are giving the younger moms this outdated information but it’s still wacko to send virus’ in the mail. I would go read for myself but it’s too stupid to even read about. I hope someone organizes a sting and arrests them all.
Just when you think you can’t be shocked anymore, because abject stupidity seems to be pandemic. If only there were a vaccine for stupid, or at least a mandatory quarantine! I too hope that postal regulations bite these morons on the butt!
Well, it’s just that these days we have a vaccine that not only protects against chicken pox, but also against shingles when you’re older. So why bother with the “whoops, better get them infected now” part and thus set them up for risking shingles down the line?
The group has been closed.
Actually the shingles vaccine prevents shingles 50% of the time. The protection that the chickenpox vaccine provides against shingles in the long term is not currently documented- it’s only been administered since 1995 and it’s still unknown how long immunity lasts for or what it’s effects will be on community health on the whole. There are very plausible scenarios where widespread vaccination could lead to an increase in shingles incidence.
I think individuals should absolutely go with the CDC recommendations for vaccination, but I’m not prepared to get shrill about universal chickenpox vaccination as public policy. Some countries are betting one way, some are betting the other way and time will tell. Belgium, to give one example, has found that it would not be cost-effective to recommend universal chicken pox vaccination due to the risk of an increase in shingles cases.
I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any means. I think it makes total sense to get shrill and indignent about things like polio vaccines. But I think it hurts the cause to automatically get shrill and indignent about everything without acknowledging the very real complications. If we want our message to get across, we also need to put science above rhetoric, and be brutally intellectually honest, even if that means admitting that the case for one vaccine may be more complex than the case for another.
I’ll admit, I’m not “WTF?!!” about not vaccinating against chicken pox. I think it’s rather silly not to these days, but that’s about as strong as my feelings get.
Shipping infectious material through the mail? Oh hell no!
And when I hear the idiocy of anti-vaxers downplaying the hazards of MMR, polio, etc? I wish stupidity was painful to the person displaying it. I have a patient in his 50s who grew up in Pakistan, and is partially lame in one leg as a result of polio. Measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough - they kill, cripple, sterilize. We’ve only wiped out two diseases - smallpox, and a cattle-based disease that I’m blanking on the name of. We vaccinated against the first, and vaccinated plus culled infected herds to stop the other. Vaccination fucking works.
(I’m cheering about the malaria vaccination that’s been shown to be effective. Such good news.)
These people are pansies. They should be mailing small pox.
It’s one thing to choose not to get the vaccine and have a pox party. It’s another entirely to suggest indiscriminate exposure via mail.
The difference between a Chicken Pox party and mailing infected material wihout proper biohazard preacautions is kinda like the difference between a Chicken Pox party and having your pox-infected child cough into the central air system of a high rise apartment block, because the mother of one kid who lives there wants him to get exposed.
One is parents exposing their own kids, with some level of informed consent- the other is rampant stupidity and reckless endangerment.
How did the anti-vaxers become the majority on mothering.com? Do sane parents just not visit parenting websites? 
Rinderpest. It’s not just cattle-based, it only occurred in cattle. Still good news, of course.
Mothering dot com was originally an offshoot of Mothering Magazine, which was a print publication. I believe the print version is now defunct. But the magazine was all about “natural/alternative parenting”, including anti-vaxing, and so that’s why the website is so batshit insane.
On most of the other parenting fora I’ve seen, the anti-vaxers are an extreme minority, particularly the hard-core “no vaccinations ever” types. It’s more common to find people who decided against one particular vaccine (i.e. chickenpox) or decided to go with a modified schedule or whatever. But even those people are generally in the minority. MDC is just…special.
The website is based on the now defunct magazine. The magazine was a cesspool of anti-vax nonsense. The site has always been just as horrid. Rational vaccine discussiion is not tolerated for more than about five seconds and never has been. I was banned from the site about five years ago for daring to engage them. I know three other people who can claim the same honor. There are plenty of good parenting websites out there. Mothering just isn’t one of them.