Anti-vaxers should all take a one way trip to the Moon. Oh, wait…we’ve never been there. Stanley Kubrick directed all the footage, and he’s dead.
Oh well, at least the Jews weren’t responsible for 9/11. The rabbits did it, they planned it from the beginning. STUPID RABBITS!!! :mad:
What we need to do is build three arks. We’ll load the anti-vaxers, religious zealots and other flat-earther types into Ark B. Launch it into space and … well that’s pretty much it.
Too much work. Let’s shoot them and say we loaded them into an ark.
Now, didn’t you hear the President telling you to play nice?
OK, these are the ones that I need someone to explain for me in little tiny words.
Assuming (just for kicks) we go with the idea that babies do get too many vaccines too early, or that vaccinating against several diseases at once is a lot for the immune system to deal with, how on earth does that translate into ‘Don’t vaccinate’? Why doesn’t it just translate into ‘So I’m going to get my kid the diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough injections separately, at one-month intervals, rather than all at once’?
And the second one: assuming (again, just for kicks, I don’t have a clue whether it’s got any basis in fact) that naturally acquired immunities are stronger and longer-lasting, the fact remains that, for certain diseases, getting your immunity by natural means risks killing or permanently damaging you. Why does the idea translate into ‘No vaccinations’ rather than ‘So we’re gonna get boosters every ten years’?
Because the anti-vaxxers are idiotic lunatics.
And really, that’s the simplest explanation. There’s a lot of scientific evidence regarding the inaccuracy of both of those beliefs (the “too many, too soon” and the “natural immunities are better” ones).
They. Don’t. Care.
They’ve become convinced, either by their own misunderstanding of science and medicine or by the truly evil people who are marketing their own vaccines or treatments, that vaccines are a tool by which Big Pharma ™, big government, and big medicine are all conspiring to keep us ill and hide the truth, MAN! The truth about the magic of natural healing, man! The body’s ability to survive anything until we start fucking around with it with our evil western medicine, man!
I know it sounds like I’m being dismissive of your very legitimate questions, but really, that’s all it is. There is scientific evidence that they ignore for their own personal non-scientific irrational belief systems.
Your problem here is you’re trying to be rational.
Some of us might be interested in a nuanced analysis of which vaccines might be problematic in particular contexts, but gathering and considering all the facts for this is work. It’s so much easier to deal with the simple summation “vaccination is bad.” Those who aren’t inclined to engage in rigorous critical thinking lean toward the latter approach.
Many people who vigorously embrace these non-mainstream ideas are seduced by the notions that they’ve found something better than the rest of us (aren’t they clever!) and that they are onto the government/big business/whoever conspiracy working against us – and especially against them. They tend to latch onto a position and NEVER LET IT GO. Logic, compromise, practical reality – these may help you in your life but they have no place in their lives. They “know” they’re right and will not be dissuaded.
So combine intellectual laziness with entrenched feeling of rectitude and there you are. No gray, just black and white. They’re right, and that’s that.
Any other questions? 
On preview, I see that Kolga has responded in similar vein.
Not before a bunch of kids have, though.
We better keep a couple of telephone sanitizers around, just to be safe though…
But not the marketing executives. Could we please rid ourselves of the plague that is Marketing?
Wakefield was paid about $600K by a law firm that planned to make a lot of money on lawsuits. That’s what the NYTimes said. I wondered about that since law firms can’t sue on contingency in UK, or so I believed.
My family physician says that parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are guilty of child abuse, And my DIL, a family physician, has wondered if she should accept as patients families whose children are unvaccinated.
Still I have some questions. Has anyone studied connections between autoimmune disease and vaccination? There have always been a few–Christian Science followers for example–who do not vaccinate and I imagine there are enough to study that question. And I believe that people who get the real disease acquire a stronger immunity than what they get from vaccination. For example, if you got smallpox and survived, you didn’t get it again, but back in the days when I was growing up, you needed a smallpox vaccination every five years (although it didn’t always “take”, which I assume meant your immunity was too strong to have any reaction to the vaccine). On the other hand, measles is a serious disease; kids do die from it or can be severely retarded from measles encephalitis and even if the vaccine gives a weaker immunity that has to be boosted, it is crazy to advocate getting the real thing.
As for overloading the immune system, I think I have read that there is simply no evidence for that.
But if we do that, how are we to determine if people want fire that can be inserted nasally? Didn’t think of that did ya?
That’s pretty much it. The point isn’t really the vaccines themselves…if vaccines had never been invented, they’d be bitching about how much money Big Pharma makes on cures and treatments, and why don’t they work on PREVENTING disease in the first place?!
What’s at the heart of it is fear and paranoia…fear of Big Pharma, fear of the government, fear of the medical system. There’s also a lack of understanding of medicine and how science works…that there’s a body of knowledge that is built upon, and that understanding how vaccines work requires some understanding of that body of knowledge. They don’t get that their understanding of how vaccines work is at best extremely simplistic and at worst completely wrong. And if you imply that this is the case, they are extremely offended at the idea that an MD might know more about medicine than they’ve learned from Google University.
When I informed my anti-vax sister that the study was disproven, she said she didn’t care, the vaccines still make people sick, and Western medicine
is basically out to get her.
Ooookay.
I fervently disagree with her position. I just have to accept that my very young & bright niece & nephew are at risk. If they survive, I’ll fill them in on their options when they turn 18.
(We’re average Americans of European descent who got regular shots, checkups, etc. as kids, had no medical mishaps or anything. I don’t know exactly when she became so irrational).
I… could easily believe this. Assuming they knew who Wakefield was also assumes they had at least a passing interest in the scientific method, which is not an assumption I would make.
Maybe my very favorite mockery ever of the anti vax nuts (from another board):
*"Mary Sue bit her heart-shaped lips nervously, shaking back her waist-length red hair. She hoped this doctor, this one, special, doctor, the one she had been hoping to meet for her entire parenting journey, was the one who would listen. But he wasn’t!
He lowered his bushy, dark eyebrows over his cruel, beetle-like eyes and began to tell an awful story, his voice rising and rising as he shook his long, cruel, finger at her. Mary Sue took a deep breath, raising her full, well-rounded, turgid, lactating breasts towards the doctor as she proudly swung her tumescent belly, swollen with life yet again, towards this machinating tool of the medical conspiracy.
‘I’ll NEVER join you!’ she announced, her bright green eyes flashing with righteous anger. ‘Your lies and the lies of Big Pharma will never sway me from maintaining the purity of my children!’ Taking the hands of the two youngest members of her brood, Marjoram and Typhoon, she indicated that the others should follow her to safety from the doctor, who was now red faced, veins popping from either side of his neck. They fled to the safety of their soy-deisel powered minivan as the doctor chased them, flecks of foam scattering from his enraged lips as he yelled ‘LET ME STICK YOU! LET ME STICK THIS IN YOU!’"*
In addition to what others have noted (i.e Wakefield being paid close to $700,000 by attorneys hoping to cash in on vaccine lawsuits and his attempts to patent a competing vaccine which could have been quite lucrative in the event that MMR was discredited), there was another huge potential source of income that Wakefield anticipated:
“The Washington Post reported that Deer said that Wakefield predicted he “could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits” for the new condition, autistic enterocolitis.”
It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Wakefield’s chief motivation in pursuing his MMR “research” was to make lots of money.
There are of course others who’ve found a lucrative business model in exploiting a phony vaccine-autism connection. Take the Geiers - a father-son team with a home lab and papers published in lower-echelon journals purporting to show that autism is caused by mercury (i.e. the preservative formerly used in many vaccines). They actually franchised clinics set up to dose autistic children with a chemical castrating agent (Lupron) on the weird theory that this would make it easier to remove mercury from their bodies. The clinics also were set up to offer a large array of dubious and expensive diagnostic tests.
The field of questionable diagnostic tests for autistic children has expanded in recent years. One form of heavy metal testing is inherently inaccurate in that kids are found to have high mercury levels in the urine - but only after being given a chelating agent which releases body mercury stores. When those urine levels are compared to a normal reference range for urine, you get a false impression of elevated values, and parents are urged to take their kids to practitioners who offer EDTA chelation treatment (of no demonstrated value for autism, and potentially dangerous).
So yes, there’s money, sometimes a lot of it to be made by hyping antivax fears.
As to the “next move for the antivax crowd”: they’ll fasten their mental blinders ever more tightly and pursue new vaccine “toxin” angles and conspiracy theories unabated. Parents sitting on the fence on the issue of vaccine safety may have had their eyes opened by revelations of Wakefield’s schemes, but committed antivaxers cannot be convinced by evidence and logic.
My God, Kolga and Gary T and Sarahfeena, that’s depressing. I mean, I have a healthy dose of suspicion about Big Pharma and overmedication and all the rest (the ads on American TV are gobsmacking: ‘Are you sometimes tired? Are you sometimes irritable? Do you have feet? You need our new drug!!! Side effects include disintegration and mild death’). And I do think the main reason why the vaccines are given in clusters is probably because the doctors don’t trust you to bring your kid back every few weeks for individual shots, rather than because it’s objectively better. But the leap from that to leaving your kid vulnerable to diphtheria is mind-boggling. I don’t think I’m ever going to get it.
It strikes me as people looking for something to be vigilant against, to reassure themselves that they’re taking the best possible care of their kids - and missing the real threat because, ironically, vaccines have done such a good job of eliminating it. These are people who’ve probably seen Big Pharma do things they don’t like on a regular basis, but have probably never seen a baby with whooping cough. So they fight the threat they’ve actually seen - because they don’t think far enough to realise (don’t want to realise?) why the other one has become invisible.
My mother grew up in a Third World country where kids routinely died of all the stuff we vaccinate against. Measles and whooping cough are REAL terrors to her, not nebulous statistics. When we were a few weeks late getting Widget her MMR, for various reasons, my mother couldn’t believe it. She had me and my brother vaccinated practically the exact second we were old enough.
The cultural difference might explain some of your confusion. In America, vaccines have worked, and worked well. They’ve done their job. They are a victim of their own success. Parents here do not have the experiences of being terrified that their children will die of a preventable disease. It’s been two generations since parents had to wonder which of their children would contract polio. And your statement regarding whooping cough is correct - at least, until recently, when children started to die of whooping cough.
Parents here, therefore, have the luxury to indulge in whacko conspiracy theories regarding a shady cabal of cigar-smoking pharmaceutical executives, leering and sadistic doctors, and evil scientists all plotting together to turn their children into zombies.
In general, conspiracy theorists like feeling smarter than the rest of the world. They want to believe that they, and they alone, have a window into wisdom that the rest of us lack, with our reliance on modern schooling and western medicine. That need to feel superior, along with an utter lack of understanding of how scientific research works, creates a rock-hard insistence that because they WANT the world to be mysterious, it must BE mysterious.
How ironic that there may actually have BEEN a conspiracy by Big Pharma… Just not on the side the anti-vaccinators thought.
(Though there’s a thought - how would they react if they were told that Wakefield was basically paid off by Big Pharma to fake anti-vaccination study results? Would their brains explode? :))