I have a friend who’s an anti-vaxxer. She’s a retired nurse-practitioner, so you’d think she’d know better, but her response to every question turns into some sort of attack on Big Pharma. When I tell her I don’t even consider any claim not backed by wide-scale, double-blind, repeated clinical trials, she replies that Big Pharma funds all the research centers, and nothing I say can dissuade her. When I point out that Big Herba, as I call it, is as big a capitalist venture as Big Pharma, and that some herbal companies are, in fact, owned by Big Pharma, she replies she gets only locally sourced items or stuff made by small, independent companies.
I banned the topic when she insisted–over the strong recommendations of my docs (All docs who aren’t naturopaths are in the pocket of Big Pharma, according to her, and you can’t convince her otherwise.)–that the flu vaccine “wreaks havoc” on my compromised immune system. (I have lupus.) I told her* flu* wreaks havoc on my immune system . Oh, and she argued all this as she was recovering from a bad case of the flu.
I also know an ultra-conservative anti-vaxxer. I think there’s a type that’s suspicious of big government and Big Pharma and, once they’ve drunk the all-natural, locally sourced Kool-Aid, refuse to examine the issue subjectively.
It’s that kind of logic and the inability to objectively analyze data that make me so uneasy about the future.
Just saw this article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406
It suggests that at least online antivaxxing is largely female. Behind a paywall though. Maybe there is a big right wing antivax thing (a lot of the home school crowd), but it’s mostly a left leaning movement, and outbreaks of pertussis etc. are mostly in left leaning areas.
Also being against mandatory vaccinations is not the same thing as antivax. I don’t agree with either but the former is at least not knee-jerk/completely anti-science.
Around here (Brooklyn, NY), the anti-vaxxers are affluent, politically and socially liberal lefties. They tend to be highly educated. I’d bet that nearly half of them have graduate degrees, and virtually all of them have a college degree. It’s inexplicable.
Since the OP asked about religious affiliation, the anti-vaxxers I described above generally have none. There might be a few who, say, have a seder on Passover, or go to mass on Christmas, but that’s about it. No religious affiliation at all. In fact, they’re probably mildly hostile to organized religion (although not to “spirituality”).
From what I’ve read, pregnancy can have a significant impact on mood. Some get a big boon to their mood while others get postpartum depression.
Perhaps it can also result in increased anxiety which then results in those women being overprotective and overestimating risks to their children? Am I alone in having encountered mothers of pre-school children who were irrationally scaredy when it came to their kid?
Evolution and climate change: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the GOP is a coalition chiefly made up of economic conservatives and social conservatives. Evolution denial comes from social conservatives and climate change denial comes from economic conservatives. Each wing ended up adopting the other’s denial.
Mothers (including the comically misnamed Thinking Moms Revolution) seem to outnumber fathers among the rank and file of antivaxers. On the other hand, leaders of the cult include such male luminaries as Joe Mercola, Mike Adams, Alex Jones, Kent Heckenlively (and others in the demented crew at Age of Autism). Adams and Jones are among the far right-wingers who view vaccination as a sooper-evil plot by the Left.
Their “religion” is largely founded on making money.
In what specific Christian religious sect is this doctrinal statement accurate?
I ask because it’s not a very good description of Catholic belief: we believe that original sin is not guilt in the same way that actual sin is. The “sin,” in original sin as more of an analogy than a literal sin: it simply refers to the flawed nature and capacity to choose wrong over good that all humanity (with some notable exceptions) has.
Jesus died to wipe out the consequences of our actual sins, not original sin, in the Catholic view.
And of course Catholics have no problems at all with evolution.
Too late to edit the above, but readers should be aware that non-Catholic Christians have a number of views about what, precisely, Jesus’ sacrifice was for and what it did. Many subscribe to the “penal substitution,” theory, in which dying of torture on the cross satisfied God’s divine justice and anger against humanity for our sins, eliminating the need for further punishment. This is not the Catholic view.
As a parent, I can speak somewhat to the “anxiety of parenting”. I fully understand why many parents who can manage it become “helicopter” parents.
Vaccines can become wrapped up in this because, when people are unsure, their default position is to do nothing. After all, it would be awful to subject your kid to a painful vaccine, only to have it irreversibly harm them.
Vaccines play horribly well into this dynamic, because when they work well, they only cause pain and cost money on day one, then nothing else happens. (BTW, no 100% promises of efficacy.) The circulating stories of things going wrong (not necessarily proven due to vaccine, but at temporally related in some fashion) tend to be of things going “bigly” wrong. This is part of why it helps to make vaccines mandatory- then most people feel, “Well, it sucks, but what are you gonna do?”
My daughter could have written this about her neighborhood in east coast Brooklyn (Park Slope) which has one of the lowest vaccination rates around (and she makes sure her son gets every shot going as a result).
My doctor says that refusal to vaccinate is a form of child abuse.
Hey, I did write it a few posts up about Brooklyn. I don’t live in Park Slope (I’m in Brooklyn Heights), but I’m all too familiar with the Park Slope thing.
I’d bet the rent that there’s significant overlap between Brooklyn non-vaccinating parents and Park Slope Food Co-op membership.
These people are insane. As I said above, they’re generally highly educated and affluent. They have no excuse. They should be prosecuted for, well, something. Not only are they endangering their children, they’re endangering those who actually can’t, for one reason or another, be vaccinated.
Don’t these morons have parents or grandparents? My father remembers when polio was commonplace. If I ever told him I wasn’t having my kids, his grandchildren, vaccinated, he’d shoot me and take custody of the kids.
I have seen one of these idiots say that vaccines didn’t stop polio, better sanitation did. I responded that I was alive back then, and I don’t remember better sanitation - just getting the polio vaccine in kindergarten.
This claim gets things backwards. Better sanitation essentially caused the fearsome polio outbreaks of the early to mid-20th century.
When waste disposal systems were more primitive, children were exposed to poliovirus at a very young age, when the disease tended to be relatively mild. As sanitation improved, the onset of disease started occurring later, and paralytic polio became a much more frequent and severe consequence in older children.
The “better sanitation” argument beloved of antivaxers applies to infections like typhoid and hepatitis A, but not to the great majority of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, polio, Hib meningitis etc.
The aforementioned niece subscribes to, and receives nearly all of her “info” from, this site:
Yes, she is very religious. That’s part of the reason why she’s homeschooling.
She is very much against abortion too, and since some vaccines were based, decades ago, on aborted fetal tissue, she and her ilk believe that they are inherently evil–and therefore, that’s another reason not to get them.
My cousin replies, “Fuck that. Bring on the fetii.”
An interesting piece of demographic research was done by The Hollywood Reporter, which found that the highest rates of non-compliance in SoCal were found in the wealthiest, and most heavily Democrat, enclaves in Los Angeles County.
One can probably find a higher rate of unscientific beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum for different topics.
More leftists probably believe in the dangers of GMO foods, the relative health risks of nuclear power plants, and fracking, for instance, as well as the ability to change one’s gender from what one’s DNA reflects, as well as beliefs in the healing power of crystals, and a wide range of New Age health practices.