Is this woman a dangerous moron?
nan said:
OK, please don't shoot the messenger. I am not an anti-vaxxer and I already have enough people yelling at me on the political threads. But, I like to see both sides to an issue represented and I just came across this article on twitter and it was upsetting to read. I'm curious what others here think:
‘I will never get over feeling I killed my son’: Anti-vaccination activists refuse to be 'silenced’
https://www.rt.com/news/454052-vaccination-activists-side-effects-/
It's an upsetting story of a parent who is grieving a child who died of SIDS... which tends to be an ambiguous reason for a baby's death.
Other than the mother's very strong feeling that immunizations led to the baby's brain stem and hippocampus damage/SIDS, and that she feels it's all her fault because she followed the regular immunization schedule, there is nothing in the whole article that provides any evidence of a relationship between the two.
sprout said:
It's an upsetting story of a parent who is grieving a child who died of SIDS... which tends to be an ambiguous reason for a baby's death.
Other than the mother's very strong feeling that immunizations led to the baby's brain stem and hippocampus damage/SIDS, and that she feels it's all her fault because she followed the regular immunization schedule, there is nothing in the whole article that provides any evidence of a relationship between the two.
I thought of that too, but isn't 13 months late for SIDS?
Yes. But even the third-party neuropathologist she went to to try to get more answers from seemed to confirm.
That it comes from RT is another reason to dismiss it:
nan said:
I thought of that too, but isn't 13 months late for SIDS?
People die all the time. Sometimes the cause is known. Sometimes not. But it doesn't mean that some event that preceded it (like getting a vaccine or eating a ham sandwich) can be ascribed to be the cause. This is the problem with all of these "vaccine related deaths". There is never any evidence that it was the vaccine that did it. No matter how big a stink a grieving parent makes about it.
drummerboy, you may want to reconsider that grief counselor career.
One of the hardest to understand parts about medicine is that guidelines are developed by studying large populations. Treatments have benefits, but they also have costs and risks. Routine colonoscopy is a perfect example. It's recommended for everyone at the age of 50 to get their first one. Why not younger? People get colon cancer before the age of 50. The answer is there are risks to the procedure which outweigh the benefit of catching a rare cancer in someone younger than 50. But your risk of colon cancer once you hit 50 is high enough that it now outweighs the risk of colonoscopy.
So the guidelines are designed to help the highest percentage of a population.
It's the same with something like vaccinations. Yes, there are rare occurrences of vaccine-related complications and even rarer deaths, and they get a lot of attention and sympathy. And like drummerboy points out some of the injuries and deaths may not even be proven to be related to the vaccination. But the risk of NOT vaccinating is so much higher across the entire population. And most people alive today have never seen the effects of these "childhood diseases" that it's much easier to focus on a few stories of grieving parents who believe a vaccination killed their child (right or wrong).
I'll finish this by saying I don't know what my reaction would be had something horrible happened to my child shortly after receiving a vaccination. Who I would be right now, and what I'd be typing on this website.
I don't doubt that I'd be looking for villains if something like that happened to me, and its natural enough for humans to say A caused B if A preceded B, but the objective reality is that grieving parents have nothing to add to the debate about whether and to what extent vaccines are dangerous. The grieving parent angle is used to manipulate the debate (to the extent there really is a debate on this subject).
bub said:
That it comes from RT is another reason to dismiss it:
https://archives.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php
Being a propaganda arm of the Kremlin one of its remits is to weaken the west. To cause discord and doubt, to have the population question and disregard any and all authority. To make the progressive liberal west ineffectual.
Putin, like Trump, thinks in a simple binary way. Normally when a deal is struck or something is empowered like a country, it can be beneficial to all sides. As when Germany was empowered after WW 2. The likes of Trump don't believe that. They feel if there is a gain for one side then the other side must have a loss. That both sides can gain is alien to them.
Putin wants to weaken the west feeling that will empower Russia. Less power to west, more power to me. To make the west ineffectual, to weaken its economic power. His own military chief of staff said that the future will be determined by info wars, propaganda.
But don’t blame nan. She’s just the messenger of an article [corrected from “articles”] she has barely read.
DaveSchmidt said:
But don’t blame nan. She’s just the messenger of articles she has barely read.
That's pretty nasty. You know I read a lot and deeply. I asked not to be attacked so I guess that got you going, except for the guy going after RT, as if they did anything wrong either.
nan said:That's pretty nasty. You know I read a lot and deeply. I asked not to be attacked so I guess that got you going, except for the guy going after RT, as if they did anything wrong either.
I simply repeated your own excuses. You’re right: I don’t like them. I don’t have to.
DaveSchmidt said:
I simply repeated your own excuses. You’re right: I don’t like them. I don’t have to.
You said I was the messenger of ARTICLES I barely read. That sounds like I do that all the time. That's a personal attack. I fully admit I skimmed this one cause it was too upsetting to read.
nan said:You said I was the messenger of ARTICLES I barely read. That sounds like I do that all the time. That's a personal attack. I fully admit I skimmed this one cause it was too upsetting to read.
That was a mistake. I meant that one article. I’m sorry for my error.
DaveSchmidt said:
That was a mistake. I meant that one article. I’m sorry for my error.
Ok, thanks. I'm going back to the politics threads where it's a lot calmer.
The attacks by anti-vaxxers that a child's death was "not real" from these illnesses, and on other issues, such as pro-gun Sandy Hook deniers that the children's deaths were "not real", are just unfathomable to me.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/health/anti-vax-harassment-eprise/index.html
Is there a name for going into this very disturbing, denial-of-reality attack realm?
from Robert Roe, Maplewood Health Dept. We are currently working with the SOMA Two Towns for Ages senior group to do short video interviews of people who remember what it was like before vaccines. Contact me if you have a good recollection. I talked about polio. 973-762-8120 x4400.
sprout said:
Is there a name for going into this very disturbing, denial-of-reality attack realm?
Sadly, a phrase for our age.
Ah -- I found a pretty good analysis of Denialists. A bit lengthy (and written in the style of a philosophy major), but does help me understand it a bit better:
Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth: From vaccines to climate change to genocide, a new age of denialism is upon us. Why have we failed to understand it?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
Some snippets:
Denialism is a post‑enlightenment phenomenon, a reaction to the “inconvenience” of many of the findings of modern scholarship.
The discovery of evolution, for example, is inconvenient to those committed to a literalist biblical account of creation.
Denialism is also a reaction to the inconvenience of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world.
In the ancient world, you could erect a monument proudly proclaiming the genocide you committed to the world. In the modern world, mass killing, mass starvation, mass environmental catastrophe can no longer be publicly legitimated.
Yet many humans still want to do the same things humans always did. We are still desiring beings. We want to murder, to steal, to destroy and to despoil. We want to preserve our ignorance and unquestioned faith. So when our desires are rendered unspeakable in the modern world, we are forced to pretend that we do not yearn for things we desire.
[...]
We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.”
Nor are anti-vaxxers ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be released from the clutches of Big Pharma.
[...]
How do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals from our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed?
Denialism, and the multitude of other ways that modern humans have obfuscated their desires, prevent a true reckoning with the unsettling fact that some of us might desire things that most of us regard as morally reprehensible. I say “might” because while denialism is an attempt to covertly legitimise an unspeakable desire, the nature of the denialist’s understanding of the consequences of enacting that desire is usually unknowable.
It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are.
It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews.
It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.
[... While I think it's an insightful analysis, the article ends on a not-very-helpful conclusion:]
Perhaps, if we can face up to the challenge presented by these new revelations, it might pave the way for a politics shorn of illusion and moral masquerade, where different visions of what it is to be human can openly contend. This might be a firmer foundation on which to rekindle some hope for human progress – based not on illusions of what we would like to be, but on an accounting of what we are.
My own thought is to ask the denialist which of the possible outcomes/understanding of the consequences, is the denialist's expectation. Clarifying these expected outcomes, or goals, may provide a method to have a more rational discussion with those who initially appear irrational.
More whackadoodle stuff....polio is a virus?
Any of you wonder why the Spike in polio when DDT was unleashed into the public? And wonder why it declined after DDT was banned in the USA? Then it was shipped to the poor countries which then showed polio increased? Timing is everything....
When a president gets a disease we go nuclear on the population.... Roosevelt....then came the nasty dangerous almighty butter!!! Gave another one a heart attack!....so we let margarine rum rampant in the population...
Keep living in your little bubbles.
Jaytee said:
More whackadoodle stuff....polio is a virus?
Yes, it's caused by a virus. Hence the efficacy of the vaccine.
For reference. There are many other sites but this one seemed a good compromise between too much advertising and way too much scientific jargon. Yes, it is a kind of virus that affects the myelin sheath of nerve cells.
Another nut job, who unfortunately has the health of millions of others in his hands as governor.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he made sure all his nine children were exposed to chickenpox and caught the disease instead of giving them a vaccine cnn.it/2TZGhV3
https://twitter.com/cnn/status/1108530379873574913?s=21
South_Mountaineer said:
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he made sure all his nine children were exposed to chickenpox and caught the disease instead of giving them a vaccine cnn.it/2TZGhV3
https://twitter.com/cnn/status/1108530379873574913?s=21
This used to be a thing before vaccines, but now it's just plain stupid. Or Republican orthodoxy. Take your pick. Same difference.
Jaytee said:
More whackadoodle stuff....polio is a virus?
Any of you wonder why the Spike in polio when DDT was unleashed into the public? And wonder why it declined after DDT was banned in the USA? Then it was shipped to the poor countries which then showed polio increased? Timing is everything....
When a president gets a disease we go nuclear on the population.... Roosevelt....then came the nasty dangerous almighty butter!!! Gave another one a heart attack!....so we let margarine rum rampant in the population...
Keep living in your little bubbles.
er, talk about whackadoodle....
bub said:
https://vaxopedia.org/2017/10/19/is-there-a-ddt-polio-connection/
This is a no brainer. There really is no need to write this article or even bring it up. Those believing there is a DDT Polio link will never change their minds.
What next? The fantasy that sunspots cause polio? The articles disproving sunspot polio links? A complete waste of time.
We're regressing from a world of rational science to superstition and silliness. I'm waiting for the day that National Weather Service funding is cut so we can instead rely on thoughts and prayer for our forecasts and for good weather.
I'm under the impression that chicken pox doesn't cause much suffering. Is the vaccine really necessary? How is it cruel to expose your kids to it? What should I know?
Rentals
Featured Events
-
Stephen Whitty Presents - Hometown Movie Stars: The Celebrated Actors Of CHS
May 6, 2024 at 7:00pm
Advertisement
I didn't read it. I'm as interested in reading an anti-vaxxer article, no matter what the reasoning, as I would be in reading a flat earth or climate denying tract. A waste of time.