Utterly ridiculous nonsense -- anti-vax "conversation starter"

In My Humble Opinion
1

I approve of starting a conversation. But it goes downhill from there…one of my FB friends - who has a parenting blog - shared (did not write) this steaming pile of irresponsible horseshit.
[link removed — Ellen Cherry]

Anyway, I am too tired and busy, but I would love to respond to her. The logical fallacies are several, but the generally asininity is just…sad. One of my fave parts: “Are we really debating which risk is riskier?” @@)"???)#%^. Uhhhhh…yes, yes as a matter of fact we f*&^ing are. Sort of like what we do every day all day in our efforts to stay alive, healthy, and, oh I don’t know, not crushed to death or poisoned. For example, it is risky to wear a seatbelt because – if an accident occurs – suppose there is a resultant fire, the seatbelt traps you, and you burn to death. This could conceivably really happen. It may have happened. But the risk that it will happen is extraordinarily low when compared with the much greater risk of hitting one’s head, being thrown from the car, and/or becoming a projectile that will crush the passenger in front of you-- if an accident occurs. For that reason – and because we engaged in that oh, so peculiar and undoubtedly valueless exercise of COMPARING RISKS, we realized, “Hey, it is idiotic not to wear a seatbelt if I wish to best enhance my chances of keeping all my brains inside my head.” Not getting vaccinated is much riskier than getting vaccinated because x y z q. [insert some facts here]. That is just one of the many things I would like to say back.

Anyway – I felt like ranting, but if you feel like drafting any response for me, addressing this, feel free. :-). I have to be civil though, and want to be - I think this might be an opportunity to actually engage in the conversation. Doubt she will listen, but what if she did? Or maybe I could give an antidote (ha) to some poor new mom who is reading my friend’s FB or blog.

2

Just the URL makes me want to shoot myself.

3

Me too.

4

It is no good trying to argue. They have probably heard, if not assimilated, the arguments, and if they haven’t they won’t care to. good, succinct response, that just might make someone take thought, is “Murderer!”

5

A recent poster was kind enough to share some 75(?)links to reputable sites listing study after study in support of vaccination. I’m just mean enough to post something like that on someone’s wall in response to the ignorance they spread. But I’m too idle to search for that OP right now.

6

It’s rare that a first response sums up my feelings so completely, but this does it. :slight_smile:

7

Shooting them would be more productive.

8

I’m fascinated how one thoroughly discredited “scientific” paper got so much traction. I suppose a sociologist/psychologist could write a book about this.

It seems to me this Anti-Vax thing has become something like a religious belief crossed with a conspiracy theory. And other than in Jack Chick tracts, how often can you “convert” someone merely by reasoning with them? The saying “Don’t argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” comes to my mind.

9

Ask them to provide a cite for an instance of autism caused by vaccination. Just one, for a start.

Then provide them cites for the number of deaths and illnesses caused by non-vaccination.

10

There were anti-vaxxers long before the flawed autism study. Indeed, at least in the States, despite a lot of peoples perception of a growing movement, vaccination rates have actually stayed pretty constant, suggesting the study (or any study) didn’t have much real effect. It was just latched onto by people who already believed vaccination was bad, and weren’t going to vaccinate their kids in anycase.

Which I think is the basic problem with “conversations” like the one the shudder “natural mom who loves prada” claims she wants. The position isn’t really based on reason, so as the saying goes, you can’t really reason her out of it. Show one line of evidence is flawed, and she’ll jump to another.

11

You cannot debate someone who isn’t listening. This woman isn’t listening.

Regards,
Shodan

12

We don’t think Vaccines work the way she thinks we do. Vaccines don’t provide ultimate protection, they significantly increase protection. That increase makes diseases unable to gain enough traction in the population to become epidemics. People still get the disease, but they infrequently pass it on, and the outbreak stalls.

Second, natural immunity actually requires you to get the disease first. You don’t get immunity to Polio unless you fucking get Polio. People getting sick with Polio is the problem to be solved, not the solution you’re after.

We have that, it’s called history. Such as, before vaccination, smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people and decimated populations, after vaccination, smallpox is completely eradicated from the planet.

13

“Firstly, I am not an anti-vaxer, I am not anti-vaccine”

Virtually everyone who says this goes on, like you, to make anti-vaccine arguments. If you can’t be honest enough to characterize your own position, why should I believe anything else you say?

You think “natural immunity” through disease is desirable. Would you have wanted to live in the Middle Ages when a third of the world’s population was dropping dead of the plague, given the 2:1 odds that you would have survived with a shot at “natural immunity”? Do you think crippled polio victims are happy they have “natural immunity”? Are you happy for the hundreds of thousands of parents around the world whose kids die of measles every year, because they were given an opportunity at “natural immunity”?

Just a little conversation starter. :slight_smile:

14

I don’t think there are many anti-vaxxers my age. We remember childhood diseases. We recall the panic over availability of the Salk vaccine in 1955.

My family doctor calls it child abuse. One thing to acknowledge is that natural immunity seems to confer lifetime immunity while vaccination apparently doesn’t.

15

Not necessarily true.

For instance, “natural” immunity after contracting pertussis wanes after 4-20 years (immunity through vaccination decreases after 4-12 years).

Some vaccines confer very long immunity (lifetime in the vast majority of those getting measles vaccine, close to 20 years or more in the case of rubella and hepatitis B).

And even if you need a booster shot to keep up immunity in some cases (i.e. pertussis), it beats the hell out of needing to get sick in order to get that “natural” immunity.

16

We have 107 studies listed.

The linked article is filled with bad assertions. The problem with the natural immunity she loves so much is that it carries much greater risks than vaccination does. It’s really that simple. Measles, for example, carries a roughly one in five risk of serious complications. The measles vaccine, OTOH, carries a far lower risk of serious complications. Measles is also highly contagious whereas a measles vaccine is not. So when she says that she’s being asked to take one for the team by being asked to get a measles shot rather than an actual case of the measles, it’s really the other way around. Measles is very dangerous in babies. Babies are generally not vaccinated against measles until about a year because the shot often does not provide immunity at that age.

Another idiotic demand of hers is to have a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study. That kind of study would be completely unethical. You can’t withdrawn known protection from a group. It’s like asking someone to jump out of a plane without a parachute to prove that parachutes are safe. That sort of study would also have all kinds of problems as my co-author points out here.

She concludes her dumb little rant with perhaps her most ignorant and genuinely nasty assertion: If your vaccines work the way you say they do – you’re safe. Not necessarily. No vaccine is one hundred percent effective. Also, many vaccines cannot be given to certain segments of the population. Why should someone face health risks because of ignorance like hers?

In short, she’s not having a conversation. She’s just demonstrating her need to take a bio class.

17

tesseract, do not bring disagreements with others elsewhere and encourage people here to gang up on them. We’ve got a longstanding policy against fomenting board wars.

18

I’m reopening this thread with the understanding that this conversation is here, not ganging up over at someone else’s blog.

19

Yes! And while we’re at it, let’s start a long term study of seatbelt-wearing vs. non-seatbelt-wearing children in car accidents! Or a long-term study of people dangling from cliffs who get helped up vs. those who don’t! The reason we don’t have vax vs. antivax studies for vaccines that have long since been shown to be effective and safe is because it is extremely unethical to unnecessarily expose children to diseases which could maim or kill them. This is a very basic thing that many anti-vaccine advocates seem to miss. It would be insanely unethical, and we have no reason to believe the results would be anything other than “the sole significant difference is that the unvaccinated group had far more cases of vaccine-preventable disease than the vaccinated group”.

20

Actually, you’d see more than that. Case for case, the vaccinated children who did get sick would, on average, have illnesses with shorter durations, and better outcomes, with fewer residua (residua are things like hearing impairment, asthma, rheumatic diseases, etc., and syndromes specific to the disease, like post-polio syndrome). The death rate among vaccinated children who got sick would be lower.

But to say that asking for a study like that is missing the point is like noting that the sky is blue.

To address another topic, I disagree with her “me and mine” attitude, with her idea that herd immunity is not something parents should be expected to consider. We are all responsible for one another, and personally, I think it’s especially true for people with children. When my son is playing with a kid at the park, even a kid he just met, I watch them both. It’s what parents do. If the other kid got hurt, I’d run over to him, and attend to him until his own parent showed up (which would probably be very soon, but one never knows). Like it or not, unless you go live in isolation somewhere, you are responsible for your child’s whole cohort.

Yes, vaccines have a non-zero risk, but she clearly does not understand the risk of any of these diseases. I’m not sure what she even thinks “natural immunity” is. I wish she had defined it, because immunity from a vaccine is natural. It’s not an injection of antibodies-- it’s an injection of something that causes your body to manufacture antibodies, just as the disease itself would, without your having to get sick.

That blog post made me so angry; I’m glad the thread is back open, because it was better articulated than some of the crap people usually post, which is what makes it so dangerous. I’m not going over there to downvote it and say “The Straight Dope sent me,” but I’m glad I get to express myself here.