This is one of those posts that will get a lot of blowback against me. But I don't care.As far as I'm concerned, the blowback will come mostly from selfish idiots, but I have to take this bullet, I've decided.
This is about the hot button topic of vaccinations, and why the anti-vaxxers are putting us in so much danger.
It could be because they're stubborn, want to be trendy, believe whatever is on the internet, or think there are all these grand conspiracies among hordes of people just craving to ruin their kids. In large part, the anti-vaxxers have been manipulated by people and organizations with evil intent, both domestic and foreign.
I've long been fed up with anti-vaxxers who believe against all serious evidence that pretty much all vaccinations will give kids autism or worse. The parents who don't vaccinate their kids also don't appear to give a crap about whether their willful ignorance kills other kids. For some, it turns into a cult-like belief. They've swallowed bad propoganda hook, line and sinker.
In the Pacific Northwest, there's a nasty measles epidemic going on now because many parents there are anti-vaxxers.
I'm going against some advice here as I attack the anti-vaxxers. NPR recently interviewed medical anthropologist Elisa Sobo, who suggested we deal with the anti-vaccination types with less vehemence.
Sobo said most of the anti-vaxxers she talked with are not crazy people who wear tinfoil hats and spend their days reading wacko conspiracy theories on the internet. Instead, they're smart and highly educated.
OK, maybe, but why are they going against so much factual information here?
It turns out the anti-vaxxers are being "fashionable" in a way. They're trying to fit it. Sobo says think about it. For instance, your workplace might not have a formal dress code, but people at work always dress a certain way. So you do, too. That way, you fit in.
For the anti-vaxxers, this might come, for instance, as they're enrolling their kid in preschool in which there's a certain political vibe. There might already be a fair number of anti-vaxxers there, and they might convince the newcomer through their "facts" and "information" that they shouldn't get vaccines for their kids.
Then, Sobo says, if you attack the anti-vaxxer as being stupid or what have you, they'll dig in. If you take a different tack, she says, you might change thier minds. "If you listen to them, and you allow them to say what they think without being judged, without feeling judged, without pushing them into a corner, they're absolutely ready."
Maybe she's right. For many of them, anyway. But what of the anti-vax activists that are pushing other parents to deny science, deny safety for their children?
The real "activists," the ones trying to convince parents to not vaccinate their kids are the real villains. Some of them manage to get pretty high up on search engines like Google, and people believe the top three or four hits on Google, and believe whatever it says. There's a mistaken belief that the stuff that appears first on Google is the most reliable. It isn't.
The bad stuff also seems to be coming from every dark corner, too. The bad aspects of social media, like sponsored ads on Facebook, are a big source of the misinformation.
It also appears we can blame Russia. Again. As Oregolive.com recently reported:
"Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't trying to mess only with America's elections. He has set loose his undercover opinion manipulators to promote fear of vaccines and set pro- and anti-vaccination Americans against one another, a recent study concluded."
Why? It's part of a much broader effort to divide and instill fear in Americans. OregonLive and many others describe it as a second Cold War.
The vaccine lies often take the form of scary ads on platforms like Facebook that fall apart within a quick pass of scrutiny.
According to Business Insider:
"A sponsored ad found by Quartz journalist Jeremy Merrill shows the anti-vaccination organization Stop Mandatory Vaccination targeted women ages 20 to 60 who have expressed interest in pregnancy living in the State of Washington, where the governor recently declared a state of emergency over the measles outbreak."
One of these fear-mongering ads stated a woman's daughter died "12 hours after being injected by eight vaccines in 2008."
Notice the statement plays on emotion. It doesn't source this information, so who knows if it's true? Even if true, why did the kid die? If she was run over by a bus or something, that has nothing to do with vaccines.
The ad says that medical experts determined the vaccines were the cause of the kid's death. What medical experts? Were they just some random people off the street who said they were experts?
But never mind. The ads play to emotion, not fact. Parents are scared into not vaccinating kids, then scared when measles breaks out. The situation then gets really ridiculous.
These parents then get caught between conflicting fears when a measles outbreak does arrive. It gets silly.
One anti-vax parent is the Northwest is suddenly alarmed that the measles epidemic will harm her three year old kid, and asked for advice on line as to what to do. Of course, to this parent, vaccination was still off the table.
The photo in this post shows what the parent wrote. The parent, of course, got an earful of cutting responses. Which include:
"Build a wall around her and make the vaccinated people pay for it Sending my thoughts and prayers."
Another person sarcastically wrote: "She could try acupuncture or essential oils. If that doesn't work, how about vaccinatingt your kid."
Yet another person posted a meme that pictured a tearful little girl asking her dad, "Why do I have polio?" The dad answers: "When you were little, the internet and your mom's yoga instructor said that vaccines cause autism."
With the Northwest measles epidemic raging, one aspect of this that's getting attention is teenagers who are wiser than their anti-vax parents. They're going to health clinics, hoping to be secretly vaccinated. Or they do so as soon as they turn 18, when their parents can't do anything about it.
The kids get their vaccinations, but this causes more strife, just what the Russians and domestic social media trolls want.
One of the teenagers getting a lot of attention here is Ethan Lindenberger, an Ohio 18-year-old. He's not particularly rebellious and even though he's an adult, tries not to disobey his mother. When it comes to vaccinations, though, he did.
Ethan's mother, in the classic style of this type, made her son's wise decision all about her. She said his decision to get vaccinations was "a slap in the face." Yeah, she feels attacked somehow, by her own son, and she's having a meltdown.
"It was like spitting on me.... saying 'You do't know anything. I don't trust you with anything. You don't know what you're talking about."
What does the mom expect? That her intelligent son is going with facts and science, or with kook conspiracy theories?
Does she think there's some massive plot involving thousands of CDC workers, pediatricians worldwide and scientists? That all these thousands of doctors and experts and such are "trying to make millions" from vaccinations?
If all these people in the health care industry really did want to make millions, they'd be anti-vax, too. After all, there's more money to be made from people who suffer from serious complications of diseases that could have been prevented via relatively inexpensive vaccines.
Apparently, people who are anti-vax think they are smarter than doctors and other medical professionals, I guess because of what they read on the internet.
The anti-vax cult is largely rooted in the mistaken idea, or the lie that vaccines cause autism. It's true that nobody is quite sure why autism has gotten more prevalent, but scientists are sure it's not vaccines that are causing the problem.
However, too many people think these experts are "wrong." I guess that misinformation campaign by the Russians and others is unfortunately working.
A survey found that 34 percent of U.S. adults think they know as much or more about autism than scientists. (Remember, these scientists study autism for a living.)
Also, 71 percent of people who endorse misinformation about the link between vaccines and autism think they know as much or more than scientists.
I guess everybody is an expert. Or something.
I'm healthy. And vaccinated. Plus, I have no kids. So I'm in no danger. But this affects me like it does everyone else. One friend is undergoing cancer treatment and chemotherapy, so her immune system is compromised for now. Another friend is HIV positive. My mother turns 90 next month, and elderly people are at risk from these people, too.
Illnesses like measles aren't always the minor ailment that some people suggest. It's often serious, sometimes fatal. There's other diseases we get vaccinations for, too. Do we really want to bring back polio?
The people I just described above have other health problems that put them at risk for even more trouble from those un-vaccinated people who are spreading unnecessary, preventable diseases.
It's certainly more than OK to question science, question authority, to make sure they're not pulling the wool over our eyes. But once the dust settles and the facts are clear, why not go with those facts instead the wackadoodle ideas that the Russians or whoever want us to believe?
Not every contrarian is trying to help us, you know.
