Discussion for article #232736
Oh Oh!! We’re headed for a major measles epidemic. Now that Obama is for vaccinations, all the right wingers are going to stop vaccinating their kids.
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Beat me to it.
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Now watch! Every Republican will come out against vaccinations in 5…4…3…2…1…
There isn’t enough attention paid to the fact that parents are endangering other people by deliberately refusing to vaccinate their kids. I have professionally witnessed the ripple effect of a documented pertussis infection: between siblings, cousins, classmates, and elders, it’s about 25 people who get postexposure antimicrobial prophylaxis.
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The fact that the President of the United States has to make a statement like this, in the year 2015, about something that should be blindingly obvious, speaks volumes about the flat-out stupidity of the Republican voter. It just furthers my belief that we really are too stupid to live as a species.
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I anxiously await the newly elected Republican congress to introduce legislation reintroducing medieval Barbers. “Pfft…vaccines! What you need is a good bleeding!”
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There’s an antiviral measles drug Dumfukizumab in the pipeline to treat the children victimized by antivaxxers. It will cost about $700 for a 10 day course of treatment and the major side effect will either be liver failure or seizures, I can’t decide which, with a frequency about 10 times the incidence of autism.
We joke about this, but I’m sad to say that I’ve become so cynical about that half of the country that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I start hearing anti-vaxx stuff tied into anti-Obama stuff from my Republican friends.
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It’s not just Republicans… There has been a trend in our society over the past 40 or so years, to look at anything “government” as wrong and injurious to America. More recently, over the past 20 of so years, the “news” has bombarded us with ideological opinion that is intended to reinforce the “government is bad” theory. So… Now many people, who never heard of critical thinking, take opinion as fact. This thinking has permeated every nook and cranny of our society and culture and will continue until America is driven into third world status.
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I don’t think this particular issue breaks down along ideological lines. The part in the NYT piece over the weekend about this that stunned me was that in Southern Cali, the trend for not vaccinating children was happening in the more affluent neighborhoods. Some woman was claiming that having her son suffer through the measles and whooping cough was healthy…
I have a hard time fathoming that level of stupidity.
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I grew up in SoCal (Orange County in specific), it’s a heavy Republican stronghold. It was completely unsurprising to me that it happened there.
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Thanks, Obama!
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Not a Republican issue. The only two states with completely mandatory no-exemption vaccine laws are West Virginia and either Mississippi or Missouri, forget which.
This is primarily a fringe affluence issue. You’re only going to see this come up in wealthy areas, for the most part. And it’s bipartisan stupidity, unfortunately.
That said, now that President Obama’s come out for it, I give you a 30% chance that Anti-Vaxxers and the Tea Party are going to join forces.
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You know, I was thinking about it this morning, and a lot of it is a combination of the pandemic historical illiteracy that afflicts our society combined with a lack of lived experience.
I started school in 1968. Small town where everyone knew everyone and the death of a child was (and even today, when the town’s size has more than doubled) a thing that threw the entire town into mass grief–my point being, you noticed and remembered each dead kid. We had a single school for 1-12, each class had about a hundred kids, give or take. And of the 2400 kids I went to school with, we lost two to disease–both cancer. (Plus one by homicide and one to a car wreck.) Zero deaths from infectious disease, zero kids crippled or paralyzed by polio, zero kids with permanent pulmonary damage. No mumps, measles or chicken pox epidemics. One case of whooping cough due to vaccine failure. Diphtheria was just a word, smallpox was just a small scar on your shoulder.
And the thing is, my parents were old enough to remember how it used to be and know what an extraordinary thing this record was. Getting vaccinated was a matter of parental urgency, an urgency that they communicated to their kids, because they remembered a world with neither vaccines for anything much other than smallpox (for which they were grateful) nor antibiotics. They remembered kids held back from school for months at a time, friends who died, a world where most counties or towns of much population size had ambulances equipped with iron lungs.
But the hipster ninnies of today have no life experience of communicable disease other than colds and the occasional bout of flu and thus think of it solely as a nuisance. And they learned little history or science and disbelieve what little they remember because callow skepticism without critical thought is cool and everyone is a special snowflake entitled to make their own decisions because they all got a trophy. They don’t know that almost all of the huge life expectancy difference between Victorian times and today was caused by infant morality. They think “herd immunity” is just a made up thing made up by Big Pharma to sell harmful products. It’s not real to them, so they scoff at people who talk about vaccines as critical to maintaing our ability to pack ourselves tightly into cities, travel widely and form large social networks as hysteria and hyperbole, skip vaccinations and don’t finish antibiotics.
I spent my youth worrying about nuclear war, but as an adult, I see that bad memes are far more likely to end civilization than nuclear arms.
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I was talking to an anti-vaxxer whose daughter suffered from an extremely rare infection (we’re talking single digits per millions, I forget the name of it right now) caused by the needle, and when I pointed out the extreme rarity of the infection, she refused to believe that was anything but a cover-up, despite the fact that no one else she or I know have had that infection.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that innumeracy also looms large in the problem.
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Hmm…I wasn’t aware of any bi-partisanship in this general stupidity. When I initially heard of the Disneyland case and affluence I figured it was typical Orange County Republican idiocy. The kind of nonsense I grew up with, with the same idiots that were oh-so-smart and managed to bankrupt the county using derivatives.
I figured it was part of the affluent Republican / Tea Party / Libertarian crowd. I’d be really curious to see the demographic breakdown of anti-vaxxers.
Words cannot express how unhappy I am to be posting this:
Now, in his case, it’s the specific thimerisol-autism connection (definitively debunked some time ago) and not skepticism about vaccinations per se; I imagine you’re right about the more general trend. But AFAIK, since the original study was revealed to be fraudulent, he’s just dug in further. Makes me unutterably sad.
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