The Anti-vaccination movement!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Anti-vaccination movement!

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

SedanChair posted:

I've observed this as well, and for me it really drives home that most people's conception of medicine is utterly pre-scientific. I'm almost afraid to google "naturopathy humorism" because I'm afraid of discovering one or both of two things:

1) alternative medicine practitioners have re-examined the literature of humorism and declared it to be valid
2) alternative medicine practitioners have, through blogging and forum posting, spontaneously re-discovered humorism

Switch "toxins" for "miasmas," and I suspect you'd get a close to a one-to-one match. It'd be funny if not, you know, for the epidemics.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 01:30

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:48

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Dr Pepper posted:

How in the world is this "movement" still alive?

Also I remember somebody here having a link to a website showing pictures of the sort of horrible diseases children got before we started vaccinating against them.

I think that's a good counter, because these people are running off pure emotion as is so might as well hit with the emotional sledgehammer.

You'd think, but whenever I've tried that I get handwavy bullshit back about how with the right natural treatment or whatever a full-blown case of polio is no worse than a week with the flu and natural immunity is soooo much better than artificial, chemically derived resistance*, and certainly not nearly as bad as if your precious darling got ~*vaccine injured*~.*

*Both terms I've heard used non-ironically by supposed adult parents of young children.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 01:49

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

AlistairCookie posted:

My mom had rubella (German measles) and mumps back to back, back in the 50's, and was sick in bed for two months. She had permanent hearing loss due to the fevers. She still tells me almost every time my kids go in for a checkup to make sure they're current on their shots (even though she knows they are.) Those diseases are not to be hosed around with. Back in the early 90's, when I was a teenager, () I had chickenpox so bad I had to be hospitalized for a couple days, and miss school for a month. I'm super happy my kids were able to be vaccinated against chickenpox now.

I had the particular luck to catch chickenpox just before (like, less than a year) the vaccine for it became available. My cousin had caught it and so, as you did back before vaccination, my parents made sure my brother and I were exposed, on the theory that since everyone gets it sooner or later, it's better to have at as a child since adults have much worse times with it and sometimes even die. Wasn't particularly bad as things go, I think I missed a week or two of school and was itchy as hell.

Now, of course, I'm hoping I don't get shingles before I reach the age where I can get vaccinated for that (late fifties, if I remember right).

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 16:12

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

By not choosing one way or the other you've already made a choice that kids that cannot get vaccinations for legitimate medical reasons will die due to the lack of herd immunity. You can't simply decide to not make a choice. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

Way to Rush into that one.

Cache Cab posted:

The issue for me is the level of toxic substances they put in the vaccines. I only shop at organic co-ops, store everything in glass bottles instead of plastic, and don't allow any unnatural cleaning products into my house, so why would I pump my kids full of inorganic substances?

The main problem is that these chemicals don't have a long track record. Every few years we learn that something was bad, and they've made a "better" vaccine.

I understand that some kids might get sick and maybe even die due to a lack of herd immunity, but how many are having mental issues from unregulated substances we're injecting into them? There are lots of mysterious deaths in childhood that have no answer, and vaccines can't be ruled out. Asking me to choose between vaccinating my kids and having other kids die is like asking me to vote for Bush or Kerry. I simply won't (I vote Green Party).

I think there is a large market out there for organic vaccines. I would definitely give my kids something to help them fight infections and diseases, but I will not do so until I am 100% sure it's safe. Can't somebody make vaccines fresh, without the need for preservatives? Even if they're ten times as expensive I'd use them. I want my kids to be safe, but right now neither option is going to achieve that.

There is so much wrong with this it's hard to choose where to begin, but just as a start: since you (incorrectly) think that "these chemicals don't have a long track record," how long would their demonstrably safe use need to be for that track record to satisfy you?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 17:09

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

CottonWolf posted:

Obviously, the whole autism thing is bunk, but the logic the anti-vaxxers use on it is sound. If in a hypothetical world vaccines did cause autism in x percent of cases, and your chance of catching the disease that you're being vaccinated again is y, where y is much much less than x, not getting yourself/your child vaccinated could be entirely rational. It just depends on the relative risks. You don't not cross the road because there's a risk of getting hit by a car, it's just how much risk you think is worth taking.

Yeah, and if my aunt had a dick, she ~~would be my uncle~~ might identify as my uncle should that align with her gender identity.

More seriously, I heard that NPR was going to have a story on this afternoon about what things during pregnancy now appear the most likely culprits for causing autism, though I wasn't able to catch the story itself. Not that it'd matter a whit to your standard anti-vaxxer, of course, but the rest of us might benefit from it.

Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Mar 26, 2014

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 22:40

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Rhandhali posted:

There has been some noise made about the oxytocin used to induce labor might correlate with autism later in life. I'll try to dig up an article or something when I get home but frankly it doesn't pass the smell test and there a lot of confounding factors to consider. You don't induce labor "just because" being the biggest one. In the meantime, pity the poor ob/gyn and the likelihood we could see lawsuits out of this.

The teaser I heard for the story implied that it was something during fetal development well before birth, so I'd suspect they were talking about something else. Suppose sooner or later they'll have it up on their site and I can confirm.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 22:52

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Ah! Found the story I mentioned earlier.

quote:

Brain tissue taken from children who died and also happened to have autism revealed patches of disorganization in the cortex, a thin sheet of cells that's critical for learning and memory, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tissue samples from children without autism didn't have those characteristic patches.

Organization of the cortex begins in the second trimester of pregnancy. "So something must have gone wrong at or before that time," says Eric Courchesne, an author of the paper and director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California San Diego.

Sounds like this is something other than what you were thinking of, Rhandhali, since that suggests the roots of autism lie well before labor and birth.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2014 00:34

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Tasty_Crayon posted:

Or 'Your Highness'.

Yeth, peathant?
/

# ¿ Mar 27, 2014 04:32

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

axeil posted:

This is true. And meningitis can spread very, very quickly on a college campus. One of the kids in my class got meningitis and they shut down the entire campus to make sure it didn't spread. Granted, this info came out the day after finals but the college said if anyone at all was still on campus, especially in the affected dorm they had to leave within 24 hours.

Bacterial meningitis will kill you. And if it doesn't kill you you have a 1 in 3 chance of deafness or serious cognitive impairment. Viral meningitis isn't as bad but it can still kill you which is why most colleges require you to have shots before you can live there.

I made it a point to get the meningitis vaccine before I did my first round of grad school for this very reason. Not sure why it hadn't come up when I was an undergrad, really.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 17:55

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

VitalSigns posted:

One day the state is requiring you to feed your kids and take them to the doctor, the next day you're bent backwards over an altar screaming as Obama cuts out your heart to sacrifice on the altar of Islamomarxism.

Medical treatment. Not even once

I recently posted the whole bit, so instead of doing that again I'll just take the most relevant section

quote:

The King grabbed a syringe from the outstretched hand of one of his nearby breakdancing bodyguards, and plunged it into the man's helpless neck.

"Now you are immune to rubella."

Kyle's lingering, echoing screams of tormented horror brought a slight smile like a crack in Obama's stony brown face as he walked into his lavish velvet-lined office and shut the door behind him. He motioned for his bodyguards to leave the room, and he addressed the giant screens hanging over his desk.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2014 02:07

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

ThirdPartyView posted:

Wait, so the anti-choice people's propaganda leads to abortions?

I think he meant the "Autism Speaks" crew's propaganda, which in many ways plays up the worst possible cases as if they're the expected baseline for any autism-spectrum child.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2014 18:44

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

mdemone posted:

I am given to understand that there is in fact mercury in those vaccines, but that it is like 1% as much Hg as there is in a can of tuna. Paracelsus all up in this bitch.

Not any more (save in batch vaccines like the flu shot); I don't think mercury-based preservatives have been used since like the mid-late 90s. And yes, even then it was very small amounts, in non-reactive compounds, and mercury poisoning doesn't cause autism anyway.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2014 22:24

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Mrit posted:

Americans don't care about brown people in far off lands. They care about dying in horrific numbers.
Are you old enough to remember the swine flu freakout? And this is a real threat, not a slightly grumpy version of the flu. We would do poo poo fast.
Are you even trying anymore?

And, frankly, chemical weapons are the runty red-headed stepchildren of the WMD family. As horrifying as a gas attack can well be, the worst phosgene or sarin in the world doesn't spread like an Anthrax pandemic nor annihilate like an H-bomb.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2014 04:07

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Rhesus Pieces posted:

I want to build up my child's immune system the healthy, organic way by letting them suffer from fully preventable diseases! None of this bullshit synthetic vaccine nonsense for my special snowflake, even though it serves the exact same biological function as a chicken pox party while avoiding the actual misery of illness!

loving hell these people deserve to be screamed at and publicly humiliated, but we all know that will just make them double down and fuel the persecution complexes that give them a reason to get up in the morning.

The usual trope is ~*natural immunity*~ is soooo much better than artificial vaccinations because of valid scientific reasons that no I can't go into right now how dare you question me I'm a parent don't you think I want what's best for my child!?

I have encountered this in person. It was infuriating.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 03:59

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

pentyne posted:

Polio is no big deal, people used to get it all the time and society never collapsed!

I think Whooping Cough is the worst, because people have literally broken their back from coughing so hard and faced lifelong pain as a result.

A friend of mine in high school caught that for some reason; I think she'd been vaccinated but it hadn't taken properly, as her family weren't anti-vax idiots. She ended up having to wear a chest wrap for like a month as she'd coughed so much and hard that she'd damaged her ribs and chest muscles.

Vienna Circlejerk posted:

Yeah, they do not seem to understand that "these diseases never actually wiped out the species" does not negate "these diseases caused tremendous grief for many families." People were more accustomed to dealing with the horrible tragedy of losing a child back then:

But not so accustomed that they didn't leap at the opportunity to wipe out these horrible diseases. Obviously vaccines were not solely responsible for the drop, I'm just saying that we live in age/place where tragedy is not interwoven in the fabric of everyday life to the extent it used to be, and that probably rose-tints our view of the past.

It's incredible how little time it took for people to forget that, not too terribly long ago, "all my siblings made it to adulthood in one piece" was a rare sign of fantastic good fortune.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 18:48

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

The Vermont Senate has voted to remove the philosophical exemption for childhood vaccination (this is distinct from the religious exemption, which still stands). Whether or not it will pass the House is still in question, though for my money I'd expect that it will.

Governor Shumlin hasn't outright threatened a veto, but he has commented previously that he thinks the philosophical exemption should be retained. So I guess we'll see, if it gets that far.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2015 21:27

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:48

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

Flu shots aren't vaccines, right? Is that why you have to get them annually? I'm asking because some dipshit on my Facebook is talking about his reasoning for being an anti-vaxxer which is "I got the flu shot and got sick"

I just want to be informed before I start calling him out on how retarded his reasoning is.

I'm pretty sure flu shots are vaccines, the thing is with the flu there's so many potential strains basically what they do each year is gin up a specific vaccine for the ones they predict are the most likely to be big come flu season, and repeat the process the next year. I don't remember how the specific process goes of determining which to guard against.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 21:08

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Anti-vaccination movement!