RO: Spreading Disease via the mail

[LavenderBlue]

@Princhester

No question that specific illegal actions like posting infectious material etc should attract appropriate sanction. However, what I was commenting on was the more general point about anti-vax dialogue. As you would know if you weren’t so blinded by rage and were reading for comprehension.

Have you ever tried to engage one of them?

I have. You’d feel annoyed as hell if you tried to treat them like rational adults and got called a pHARMashill, accused of poisoning children and then banned.

Ask Dr. Offit, one of the leading pro-vaccine advocates of our time. He gets death threats because of them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/health/13auti.html

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States.

But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats.

@Sarahfeena

You’ve obviously not checked out mothering.com, or you’d be blinded by rage, too.

Or constantly encountered anti-vax nuts on half a dozen parenting message boards lovingly quoting “research” on vaccines directly pulled up from them. That board ought to be shut down.

@Princhester

I can’t speak for **even sven **but I would guess she understands there are those who are unreachable by any practical means, but I would also suspect that it is those fencesitters watching the debate that she sees it as important to win over.

And Sarahfeena, is being blinded by rage somehow a positive attribute now? It’s a matter of doing what works. It’s too important an issue to let rage be a guide.

Someone who can’t figure out that it’s a stupid idea to deliberately send infectious diseases through the mail in hopes of infecting a child with a disease that has all kinds of potentially serious side effects isn’t a fencesitter. She’s an idiot.

[LavenderBlue]

Anyone who reads the vaccine forum at Mothering (or any other forum there) and thinks the place open, welcoming, even handed or accepting has bigger issues than vaccines. The merest hint that you might have formula fed once in a while or used paper diapers let alone really daring to hint that unassisted home birthing of twins is not really a good idea will get you censured and banned.

The place is a hotbed of truly harmful parenting practices.

[even_sven]

The story the are selling is “Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Do your own research and make your own decision about what is right for your child. We respect you as a thinker and a parent.”

The story we sell has to be “Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Do your own research. While you are looking at this stuff, you may see X, Y and Z may seem to support the anti-vaccination position, but here is why they don’t actually do that. Concepts A, B and C are a bit complicated and not entirely understood, but here is why vaccination is still most scientifically supported option. We respect you as a thinker and a parent, and it’s not an ideology or belief system that we are peddling, just the most current and relevant scientific thought, for the sake of your children. The numbers tell it all- this stuff saves lives.”

It can’t be “God you are dumb and ignorant and probably criminal. We have science and science is always right, and you are just too stupid to understand why so why should we even talk to you, skeezbag? We respect you like we respect pond scum and roadkill, ignoramus.”

[Princhester]

@Kolga

There is no anti-vax dialogue. They do not, will not, and cannot read/listen/hear any facts, logic, or reason that does not fit into their mindset.

You know who you sound like when you post this? No, you don’t, that’s obvious. Let me tell you: you sound like someone who has demonised the opposition, just like anti-vaxers do. And to someone who doesn’t understand the science, or logic, you sound no less close minded than anti-vaxers.

@LavenderBlue

Have you ever tried to engage one of them?

I’ve engaged any number of nutters on woo woo topics. I know what it’s like. Combativeness gets you nowhere with them. It’s OK for entertainment value. I’ve grown up now and don’t usually bother too hard, except sometimes when I feel like beating some idiot who deserves it for the entertainment and stress relief value.

But the people to remember are those watching from the sidelines.

[Princhester]

Forgot this:

@LavenderBlue

Someone who can’t figure out that it’s a stupid idea to deliberately send infectious diseases through the mail in hopes of infecting a child with a disease that has all kinds of potentially serious side effects isn’t a fencesitter. She’s an idiot.

Stop with the dumbass prevarication and read for comprehension. You don’t in all seriousness think that this sentence is justified by anything anyone in this thread has yet said, do you? Please tell me you have more brains.

Frankly, you are doing a good job of justifying even sven’s use of the word “shrill”.

[Kolga]

@Princhester

You know who you sound like when you post this? No, you don’t, that’s obvious. Let me tell you: you sound like someone who has demonised the opposition, just like anti-vaxers do. And to someone who doesn’t understand the science, or logic, you sound no less close minded than anti-vaxers.

Age of Autism’s website ran a graphic on Thanksgiving a couple of years ago that depicted Paul Offit and other supporters of vaccines eating babies while gathered around a Thanksgiving table. They took it down quickly, and I can’t find a link, but it’s widely discussed.

Anti-vax crusaders have hacked into vaccine supporters’ business and personal emails, visited vaccine supporters’ houses and places of business and engaged in disruptive (and threatening) behavior, and threatened the lives of vaccine supporters.

And I sound like someone who’s demonized the opposition? Yea. Only to people who’ve really no understanding of the levels to which to the anti-vax movement will stoop.,

@Princhester

I’ve engaged any number of nutters on woo woo topics. I know what it’s like. Combativeness gets you nowhere with them. It’s OK for entertainment value. I’ve grown up now and don’t usually bother too hard, except sometimes when I feel like beating some idiot who deserves it for the entertainment and stress relief value.

But the people to remember are those watching from the sidelines.

The anti-vax people will always win. They engage in disingenuous, dishonest, fear-mongering, hateful, conspiracy-theory rhetoric. People who recognize the importance of vaccines will never be able to fight against that tide of emotionally-laden argument.

So forgive us if every so often, we’re not fucking Mother Teresa and we actually get pissed off that people are dying and will continue to die thanks to Jenny McCarthy’s bullshit.

eta: and thanks for using the word of the day. I’m learning quickly this week how many Dopers are worth ignoring.

[Princhester]

Just because they demonise you worse doesn’t mean you don’t demonise them. They probably deserve to be demonised, but just understand the damage you do. I understand the anger; I just don’t think it’s good tactics, and so I couldn’t stand by and see **sven **being beaten up for calmly espousing good tactics. She ain’t the enemy.

And thanks for your last sentence. You gave me a good laugh. I assume you appreciate the irony. It would be sad if you did not. Though on reflection, you probably don’t.

[Jackmannii]

@even_sven

Picture a good hearted but somewhat dim mother who got an anti-vax email forward and decided to try to figure it out for herself…So she decides to look for individual opinions, and she stumbles upon a message board that is perhaps a bit on the crunchy side, but seems to her to be full of plenty of nice, well meaning people…Along come some people with what seem to be pretty common sense reasons not to vaccinate children… So, to be fair, she takes a look at the other side. Sure enough, she finds a thread like this where they are ranting about exiling people to desert islands and gruesome death by badger! Wow, she thinks, that’s a lot of vitriol for what she’s become pretty convinced is a personal choice.

This is an interesting fantasy.

First of all, your typical sweet little granola antivax community has people who post about how vaccination is a plan for mass population reduction on a global scale and doctors don’t want moms to know about how their children are being poisoned, because the docs are just in it for the money. There aren’t opposing views - those are censored and banned (I’m talking not just about mothering.com, but others such as Age of Autism. Sweetness and light are not characteristics of the antivax movement.

After being swayed by all that gentleness and light, your scenario has Concerned Mom heading over to…the Pit? Really? And once there, like sven, she’ll overlook all the civil, informative posts to hone in on those who are so disgusted by people sending pathogens through the mail, potentially risking the health of not only their kids but postal workers and other strangers, that they will use over the top language in a forum intended for that purpose. And poor Mom will decide not to vaccinate her kids as a result. Uh-huh.

This is nonsense, and another example of false equivalence. Just as there is a vast proponderance of good evidence favoring the pro-vaccination position, there is vastly greater openness of discussion and civility favoring that position as well. If someone decides to ignore the lack of evidence and commonplace nastiness on antivax sites while being outraged by a limited amount of snarky comments from the rational side, that person wants to believe antivax foolishness and needs no excuse to gravitate to that position.

There are threads in the Pit expressing outrage over all manner of things from frivolous lawsuits to child abuse. I haven’t yet seen anyone who said something nasty about a child abuser chastised for creating sympathy for that breed and thus encouraging more child abuse.

The current example (using strangers’ pathogens sent through the mail to deliberately infect your child) is a form of child abuse, and negative (even vociferously negative) reactions are to be expected.

If sven or anyone else wants to discuss benefits and limitations of vaccines in an environment more conducive to pleasant discourse, there’s GD and GQ, where we’ve had many informative discussions. Coming in to the Pit to cherry-pick a few comments in order to scold and draw false equivalences (when the reality has been repeatedly explained) is at this point, nothing more than concern/tone trolling.

[MsWhatsit]

Seriously, if the poor confused mommy in this hypothetical scenario is turned off by vitriol, she’s not going to make it more than about two threads into MDC before turning and running in terror. You think this thread is full of vitriol? Heeee. Heehehehe. Right.

[even_sven]

I popped over to Mothering and took a look at the vaccine forum, reading maybe 5 threads. From the point of view of a newbie, it did look like a calm and reasonable place. People emphasized over and over to do your own research and use that to make your own choices. There were a couple posters that dropped some oh-so-slightly conspiracy theory references, but not really much more than “the drug companies are not always ethical.” Which is fair- they actually aren’t always ethical. From a newbie perspective, it seemed like the place that encouraged research, skepticism, and informed decision making.

I’ll repeat this, since showing some empathy has already got my creds questioned. I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I work in development, which involves a lot of public health, and I’m actually designing a vaccination program right now. I’ve seen people struck down and disabled from deseases that can be prevented with vaccine. As a result of my travels, I’ve been vaccinated for basically everything you can be vaccinated for- I think I had around 30 shots in four years. I may well spend the rest of my life in Africa trying to get people to get vaccinated. I’m not against vaccination, ever.

But i could see how, in an only-slightly different universe, I could have ended up an anti-vaxxer. I lived in a crunchy granola town, where it would have been seen as mainstream rather than alternative. I do have a healthy skepticism about drug companies- something I also research is how to convince them to not to conduct unethical drug trials that would never pass muster in the States overseas. I didn’t, at the time (like most people) have much of a grasp on the principles of public health. I could have easily been convinced of the arguments from the other side.

I don’t think that would have made me a horrible person, but a horrifically misguided one. The major activists of the anti-vaccination movement may be horrible people, but I really don’t think the everyday people are. I think they are a mix of people who don’t understand science (and that includes most people) and see something thing speaks to them, and people with sick children who are grieving and seeking an explanation and falling prey to the very human fault of attribution error.

It’s natural to dehumanize the enemy, but it doesn’t help us. We need to calmly, resolutely, and unwaveringly just keep pointing out the science. This is not a fight between equals. this is not something that has two sides to choose from. There is simply what science currently understands as the best way to prevent death and disability. Anything else is not another side to the argument, it’s just some erroneous thinking.

When we stray from the science to people’s personalities, to insults, to accusations, and to hyperbolic rhetoric, we end up making this a fight between two sides, a battle between ideologies. That automatically gives each side some credibility. And there are not two credible sides.

Anyway, if I were alternate universe anti-vax me, and I stumbled into this thread, you would have done some damage to the cause. I would have seen people who are not being rigorous or upfront about the science they are referencing, and I would have seen what appears to be an ideological war.

[MsWhatsit]

@even_sven

Anyway, if I were alternate universe anti-vax me, and I stumbled into this thread, you would have done some damage to the cause. I would have seen people who are not being rigorous or upfront about the science they are referencing, and I would have seen what appears to be an ideological war.

Sure, and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bus.

Look, I had my first kid in 2002, right around the height of the “vaccines = autism!” scare. That viewpoint was a lot more mainstream than it is now. I was a little worried, when it was time to get vaccines. I saw some of the scare sites suggesting that perhaps vaccines weren’t a good idea. I looked into it. And I very quickly discovered that the scare sites were full of nonsensical anti-science information, and got my kid vaccinated and moved on with my life. So no, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for some hypothetical person who decides not to get her kid vaccinated because she read pro-vaccination people being strident on a message board.

[E-Sabbath]

But mostly, you see people who are fucking terrified of fucking morons trying to send measles through the postal service and potentially contaminating any random postal worker and any random letter that passes through the rollers.

Measles can kill adults. Mumps can kill adults.

[Ferret_Herder]

@MsWhatsit

So no, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for some hypothetical person who decides not to get her kid vaccinated because she read pro-vaccination people being strident on a message board.

And on a topic that started with people breaking federal laws by shipping infectious material in a very hazardous fashion, no less.

Back to a previous topic - yes, vaccines do not (to the best of my understanding and research) have a 100% effectiveness rate, and this is in fact something that anti-vaccine advocates just love to herald. However, everyone left unvaccinated reduces the “herd immunity” of the population. Some people - those truly allergic to the vaccine contents, or without an immune system that can tolerate the vaccination - will inevitably be left out of vaccination. Everyone who opts out without a reason like that is adding to the chance that someone will suffer serious harm as a result.

We didn’t have to live through the bad old days of rampant contagious childhood illness that killed significant numbers of people. We probably won’t have to again - enough people are still vaccinated, thank goodness, that most of these outbreaks are confined to one county, one school, one town, and those who believe the fearful whispers and pleas and “but the evil drug companies are trying to hurt our babies because they’re greedy and selfish” may never have to feel the sting of their misjudgement. Or maybe they will. Maybe their infant will come into contact with an unvaccinated child who traveled abroad and brought something awful home, or maybe it will be their sister undergoing chemo for cancer, or their elderly parents. Maybe their younger brother will get mumps that sterilizes him, or maybe their best friend at work, happily pregnant, contracts mumps which kills the baby.

I’m going to link to Cat Whisperer’s excellent compendium of vaccinate-able childhood diseases, listing the sheer numbers of yearly deaths prior to widespread vaccination, and horrible symptoms that harmed, crippled, or killed people. (The sensitive-minded will wish to avert their eyes from the thread title; it wasn’t Cat’s fault!)

[Jackmannii]

@even_sven

I popped over to Mothering and took a look at the vaccine forum, reading maybe 5 threads. From the point of view of a newbie, it did look like a calm and reasonable place.

Unlike the Dope, yes, ever so calm and reasonable.

It would take an exceptionally blind eye not to notice the strident antivax emphasis, other pseudoscientific craziness (like HIV denialism), articles/links to likeminded sites, and warnings about what happens to forum posters who challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.

An article over there by a practitioner questioning the need for pertussis vaccination recommended a homeopathic drug for kids horribly sick with pertussis:

“Drosera for violent coughing spells ending in choking, gagging, or vomiting. Sometimes these coughs are so strong that the child can hardly catch her breath. Drosera is indicated for barking coughs, whooping cough, croup, and coughs that are worse after midnight, commonly accompanied by a bloody nose and a hoarse voice.”

Terrific, your kid can barely breathe because of a vaccine-preventable illness, and you’re supposed to give them magic water. But let’s not speak out against that advice, it might seem nasty.

So calm, so reasonable they are. Here’s more on the utter reasonableness of mothering.com.

The major activists of the anti-vaccination movement may be horrible people, but I really don’t think the everyday people are.

Your straw man is showing. There is no effort to demonize “everyday” parents who have worries about vaccines. Parents who send pathogens through the mail and risking infecting postal personnel and others have crossed a line, whether you care to recognize it or not.

When we stray from the science to people’s personalities, to insults, to accusations, and to hyperbolic rhetoric, we end up making this a fight between two sides, a battle between ideologies. That automatically gives each side some credibility.

Actually, you are the one who has strayed from the science (and the behavior deplored in the OP) in order to focus on insults in a Pit thread (and a false equivalence in that regard between antivaxers and promoters of sound science and rational public health policy).

[even_sven]

@E-Sabbath

But mostly, you see people who are fucking terrified of fucking morons trying to send measles through the postal service and potentially contaminating any random postal worker and any random letter that passes through the rollers.

Measles can kill adults. Mumps can kill adults.

See, this is exactly what I am talking about.

Why would you say “measles” when you know, for a fact, that they are sending chicken pox? Sending chicken pox is criminal, dangerous, and stupid. It’s bad enough.

Why do you need to lie and exaggerate to make your point? You are already right. You already win. It’s being intellectually dishonest for no good reason at all. That can’t possibly help, that can only hurt.

We need to be the intellectually honest ones. We need to never, ever bullshit.

[Ferret_Herder]

@even_sven

Why would you say “measles” when you know, for a fact, that they are sending chicken pox? Sending chicken pox is criminal, dangerous, and stupid. It’s bad enough.

Link in the OP - http://www.kpho.com/story/15896021/cbs-5-investigates-mail-order-diseases

CBS 5 producers found others asking for more dangerous pathogens. Two people on the Facebook page were looking for measles, mumps, and rubella.

[MsWhatsit]

Yeah, unsurprising. These people have convinced themselves that vaccine-preventable diseases are no big deal, easily survivable, and nothing to worry about. Sending measles/mumps/rubella through the mail seems as reasonable to them as sending chicken pox does. I’m surprised that anyone would even think that someone willing to send chicken pox through the mail would balk at sending other diseases as well.

[3_20_59_or_bust]

@E-Sabbath

Oh god. My dad had a Pox Party when he was knee high, I think, and I’ve read about it in books. I think the Great Brain had something like occur. But… fuck. This day and age. Not… not really a surprise when you thank Ms. Jenny McCarthy. But…

awgoddamnfuckwhistle.

The Great Brain…damn, those were awesome books.

[LavenderBlue]

even sven,

Since you find mothering so congenial go start your own dialogue on vaccines over there. Let us know how it turns out.

[pbbth]

@Ferret_Herder

Back to a previous topic - yes, vaccines do not (to the best of my understanding and research) have a 100% effectiveness rate, and this is in fact something that anti-vaccine advocates just love to herald. However, everyone left unvaccinated reduces the “herd immunity” of the population. Some people - those truly allergic to the vaccine contents, or without an immune system that can tolerate the vaccination - will inevitably be left out of vaccination. Everyone who opts out without a reason like that is adding to the chance that someone will suffer serious harm as a result.

Two days ago I updated my facebook status to say, “Just a reminder to everyone to get your flu vaccine this year. I want for everyone to stay healthy and some of us will soon have tiny babies that need the herd immunity!”

I got several responses, all very negative. One from a cousin who “doesn’t believe” in vaccinations and would rather go lick the door handle at his local bank to build up his immune system (his words) and one from a friend who advised that she has a family member who is a nurse that says newborn babies actually have pretty decent immune systems and you don’t have to worry about babies really catching anything until they are toddlers. I very politely responded that while I’m sure other people have very good reasons for their beliefs :rolleyes: that the CDC disagrees and specifically mentions on their site that anyone coming in contact with or acting as a care provider for an infant needs to be vaccinated against the flu and other diseases to protect the baby. This spurned a call from my sister-in-law, one of the smartest, most level headed people I’ve ever met, who felt the need to tell us that it is very rude to tell other people what they should do with their bodies and that we have no right to tell people that we’d prefer they not meet the baby unless they are vaccinated.

I had no idea that something as simple as a vaccine would turn otherwise very intelligent people into nutjobs.