A reader left this comment in the previous post:
Need a meme maker to say something like: ” Believes solidly in second amendment…. Also wants forced vaccinations” Ahh the irony here…
This was my reply:
For dogs? You betcha. If your untreated pooch catches rabies and bites me, you are going to have a seriously pissed off neighbor who hates needles having to get shots because you have some sort of cult-like false belief that life was healthier before Pasteur. If Cujo goes after my loved ones, including my pets….oh well.
PS: You are not one of those who believe animals have the same right as humans and stuff like that, right? are you PETA member? That would explain a lot of things.
If there are any doubts, let me clear them for you: I believe that Anti Vaxxers are a bunch of misguided dumb asses who having lived a healthy life thanks to their parent being responsible and providing them with the proper inoculations, they feel that 2% chance of complications in a vaccine is too much of a risk to their kids. And they will tell you all the alleged fake data about autism and vaccines while they are busy themselves trying to be rich rubbing a quarter against a lottery scratch-off ticket.
But, they do not want to inoculate their kids? Fine with me! I am not the one paying for the funeral or having to deal with their grief when they realized they fucked up. I am not the one that will have to live life facing family and neighbors looking at them and knowing they are talking about how they let their kid die. They are oh-so-free to enjoy that life and I will do nothing to interfere.
That will be all.
One thing i will say- you hear the pro adds for vacines say “un vacinated kids put all the others at risk”. HUH? If you vaccinated how the hell are you at risk? No matter what you do, suggest, try some buncha idiots gonna scream cause they dont like it..
Curby: some folks, who received their vaccinations, for one reason or another, do not produce protective levels of antibodies. Or, receiving a transplant, take anti rejection medications, that hobble their immune response to (measles)(chickenpox)(polio)(other), and thus unvaccinated folks may transmit whatever disease to them. Then, there are infants, whose immunity to, say, pertussis (whooping cough) is inadequate until after several rounds of immunization.
THAT is how unvaccinated folks can present a threat to the vaccinated.
I strongly suspect most anti-vaxxers are just blissfully ignorant about what viral diseases really do to people. They’re universally middle-class (or higher) people living in post-industrial first world nations with access to all the greatest medical science, clean water, clean air, reliable sewage, and daily hygiene. Most have probably never seen a dead body except, maybe, the fully embalmed, made-up, and well dressed body of grandma at her funeral…
They think that an unvaccinated child who does get chicken pox will get some itchy bumps and an upset tummy for a weekend. They don’t think that their immunocompromised toddler is now at increased risk for pneumonia, tuberculosis, bronchitis, encephalitis, and goddamn necrotizing fasciitis! Yes, that’s right, chickenpox increases the risk of contracting the %#$&ing FLESH-EATING DISEASE!
They think that a kid with Meningococcus will have a fever, achy neck, and trouble urinating for a week. They don’t think cognitive impairment, hallucinations, deafness, hydrocephalus, epilepsy, and a horrible painful death as the protective membranes covering your infant’s brain and spinal cord grow inflamed, expand, and crush the very nerves they are meant to be protecting, until the pain receptors in the brain are firing every single millisecond of every minute of every hour of every day until, eventually the brain just shuts down because it cannot process the pain signals fast enough and essentially ELECTROCUTES ITSELF!
Oh, what, you think those are shocking and disturbing? That’s just me describing things that happened on a routine basis in the 19th Century. I’m a medievalist historian, by education… You want me to go into detail about what happens to someone exposed to Yersinia pestis, better known as The Plague? I’ve read the diaries. I’ve visited the mass graves. I’ve talked to medical aid workers that have dealt with outbreaks of it. I’ve seen photographs of men and women with the disease running it’s full course… Between 1330 CE and 1380 CE the earth’s total human population dropped by a third. One in three people on earth died… But that counts isolated islands, undiscovered continents, and remote arctic tribes. In Europe, the heart of the outbreak, it was a more than one in two… It took until well into the 1600’s CE for Europe’s population to bounce back.
It’s all fun and games until your kid gets whooping cough, rubella, or polio. I’ve read more than a few articles where these yentas is moaning “if I only knew…” as their kid fights for their life in hospital.
Like Ish said above, It’s the well off moron that thinks this way. I know one woman that screeched at our pastor because her kid was refused entry to the school unless he was vaccinated. Tough shit I say. Home school then. She was one of those dizzy women that blamed the kid’s border level autism on vaccines he had as an infant. Way above her that it may be her or her husbands bad genes.
My husband and I opted to slow our children’s vaccinations. Not to not have them vaccinated, just spacing out the usual panel of vaccinations given in the first eighteen months to something a little closer to twenty-four months… Same number of vaccinations in all, just a few less given at any one time.
We had to put up with so much $#¡+ from people about this. We had researched it to the best of our ability (we’re not doctors, but we know how to separate sound medical journals from pseudoscience), we discussed it with our midwives, our obstetrician, our pediatrician, and even my husband’s uncle the diagnostician. The risks were minimal, the rewards of a slightly lower cost per visit, and a significantly less cranky baby (getting stabbed with needles hurts) seemed worth it.
But any time we mentioned it to other parents, we had to put up with the anti-vaxxer nutjobs try to claim us as being one of their own.
I despise anti-vaxxers. Pure odium. Moon Landing conspiracy theorists, Flat Earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and UFO chasers are all a bunch of pseudoscientific nincompoops, but they’re unlikely to get anyone hurt (well, unless a Flearther becomes a airline navigator). But the anti-vaccination movement is a clear and present danger to the health of their own children, my children, myself, and society as a whole.