Do you have any examples (other than health care workers who refused to get mandated vaccinations to protect patients)?
Refuting antivax memes in online exchanges is not the definition of “harassment”.
Or at least put the United Way update between the two.
One of the problems over here (UK) was that parents, on hearing the overload hypothesis, wanted their children vaccinated but wanted the vaccinations done separately. Unfortunately some idiot at the NHS decided it was more important that the NHS be scientifically correct than children be vaccinated, so many children never got vaccinated at all. :smack:
Doesn’t that secrecy mean not telling people who have young kids to not tell other people that their kids aren’t immunised and also not say “sorry, Jack’s not immunised, so you’d be best not to hold him” to people who are immunocompromised? Being genuinely middle of the road would mean not exposing people to the risks of non-vaccination by, at minimum, alerting them to your child’s status. Give them the choice, not just you.
What about the people who have lost their lives because of diseases that vaccines prevent?
As far as I’m concerned, anti-vaxxers are scum, and deserve all of those “angry statements”.
Those “idiots” might well have thought that if they backed down, the parents in question would take it as confirmation that the overload hypothesis was correct, regardless of any disclaimers the NHS might give. Those “idiots” might have surmised that this would erode parents’ faith in the authority of the NHS. The “idiots” may have been taking a long term view.
Count me as someone who can see the sense in the thinking of the “idiots”.
Her latest post is from a doctor who is willing to put her family in danger [her words, paraphrased) by not vaxxing them because vaccines come from…the tissue of aborted fetuses. Therefore, they’re inherently evil.
:dubious:
Oh, it’s worse than that. :eek:
IIRC the doctors were not allowed to prescribe the separate injections; they didn’t have any choice. It was decided upon by those further up the tree. I still think that it’s idiotic. They had a treatment which worked. It just required three injections rather than one and the child would have been inoculated. Instead of which, thousands of children were left vulnerable.
But if they had backed down it would have been spun as an admission by the ant-vaxxers, and who knows how many would have been convinced and left their children vulnerable as a consequence?
Yeah, they’re SO worried about some vanishingly tiny (by their own admission) chance of having some kind of unproven negative consequence happen due to vaccinations that they’re willing to entirely fuck up the whole vaccination system/herd immunity/etc… AND put their own children at a vastly higher risk of catching serious diseases.
It’s like being so worried about your child being trapped in the car by a seat belt in case of a wreck that you don’t put them in the car seat. Patent, absurd and criminal stupidity and lack of critical thinking which puts others at risk. And for what? So someone can satisfy their fear of “chemicals” and other equally idiotic hippie crap?
Oddly, studies have found anti-vaxxers run the range from far right to far left in roughly equal numbers.
(from memory) Similarities include somewhat higher than average income and high participation in social media.
Because all childhood diseases are so mild that nobody has any bad effects from them, but everyone who had one vaccine is a raving lunatic.
Or so the anti-vaxx crowd would have you believe.
The last bit is why it does not seem too odd to me that the far right and left both are over-represented. They share a low trust in government.
I understand the desire to think of these parents as “scum” but my concern is the general public good and treating them as scum may be an ineffective tactic. They are paranoid to be sure (of government, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Science, any and all of the above) and very mistaken, potentially tragically so. But most are believing that they are doing what is best for their children. FWIW in my pediatric practice I see far fewer refusers than I used to (very few now) and well over half who do refuse I can flip over time as we develop a relationship in which they see me as a trusted source. I More “delayers” now … I see engaging with them without calling them names as serving the public good.
How can you believe in something without demonizing and degrading the other side? This is America in the age of the internet. Get with the times.
Is that as important as getting the children vaccinated?
Umm… none. As the old vaccine would still be in use.
It’s not about “demonizing and degrading”. It’s the fact that the anti-vax movement is dangerous and that they put other people at risk.
I think it’s important to not confuse parents who are hesitant about vaccines with antivaxers. The former are potentially amenable to facts and logic. The latter are virulent science deniers, as defined in this recent publication by the World Health Organization.
The five characteristics of science denialism (first introduced by Hoofnagle &
Hoofnagle [15] and discussed by Diethelm and McKee [19]).
1.
Conspiracies
Arguing that scientific consensus is the result of a
complex and secretive conspiracy.
2.
Fake experts
Using fake experts as authorities combined with
denigration of established experts.
3.
Selectivity
Referring to isolated papers that challenge scien-
tific consensus.
4.
Impossible expectations
Expecting 100% certain results or health treat-
ments with no possible side-effects.
5.
Misrepresentation and
false logic
Jumping to conclusions, using false analogies etc.
This is interesting, seeing that awhile back in a similar thread you discussed the increasing tendency of pediatricians in your area to drop vaccine-refusing parents from their practices, your concern that they would be dumped on you and what I recall as your intention (however reluctantly) to follow the lead of those other pediatricians and not allow persistent vaccine-refusing parents and their kids in your practice to protect other patients.
Does it still concern you that while you are lobbying vaccine-refusing parents over time, their unprotected kids are still in your waiting room and examination rooms, potentially infecting other children (including those too young for vaccination or who have immune deficiencies that make them especially susceptible to dangerous communicable diseases)?
You don’t get it. Go back and try again.
I think that getting children vaccinated is definitely more important than getting ants vaccinated 