If you love measles and live in the US, don't worry... its not going anywhere [0]. Thanks to all the anti-vaxxer "do your own research" garbage people.
I do not know much but I know that anti-vaccination and climate change are heavily politicized in US, if I am not wrong. How did this don't trust the experts in the field, I know better thing start?
No matter which side you lean politically, I would like to believe most people would want the best for the kids, and essentially if its health related most people would take their doctor/pediatrician's advice. So, why are there so many people not vaccinating their kids? Is there a portion of doctors who believe in this and advice against vaccinations to the parents? Or are the parents just ignoring doctors advice and choosing to not vaccinate by themselves? Or anything else?
It was a paper written written that tried to claim that vaccines were behind the rise in Autism.
The paper was later redacted and the author admitted it was completely fake.
But the seed of fear was planted, and no amount of discussion, truth, or facts can change what many Americans "feel" is the truth.
There's also an ever growing "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual" wave in this country that this paper did not help with.
Isaac Asimov, 1980.
A big drive to what I think is fueling the anti-intellectual movement is a misunderstanding of the scientific research and purpose. Many of the "anti-intellectual" types I've interacted with often cite the same rational for their opinions and it usually falls into a few broad categories:
1) The Egg is Healthy Debate - "First they're healthy, then they're not, then they're healthy again! How can we trust them with this if we can't trust them with eggs!" - It shows lack of understanding that we can change opinion based on new information. Often they want to believe there's this black & white distinction to every issue and can't see the nuances of why something can be both good and bad for you but in different ways.
Somewhat of an additional point to this is people are taking it to mean scientists are often wrong, so maybe they're wrong this time too.
2) Bought & Paid Research - Sugar is the most recent one where lots of people are believing the war on fats was a driven narrative by interested groups. Maybe the food pyramid is a good example; something that was taught extensively but was heavily influenced by Agricultural groups. As an extension to this lots of people think they can ignore science at their leisure because they think everything is a bias from some group sponsoring the research that benefits them.
He still makes movies because that's how he makes his money these days - scamming rubes.
No, that doesn't phase me in the slightest. If rumours of someone claiming to be from the CDC having said something provocative are a form of evidence to you, then I feel sorry for you.
Facts have no effect on you either then?
I think the people I know have simply seen the establishment fuck them over so many times (think [1], [2], TTIP, NSA, whatever) that they automatically believe the opposite of what "science" & the government want them to. Especially because "science" can be transparent bullshit too - the non-esoteric doctor we have on the countryside treats absolutely everything with a cocktail of antibiotics that never help. Why trust him to vaccinate anyone's children?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-ind... [2] https://corporatewatch.org/company-profiles/monsanto-influen... (Links with government)
The other part is a side effect of elitism and marketing. "Natural", organic, hand processed goods command higher prices and margins than contemporary products, as such more individuals push "natural" living as a superior lifestyle. Ignoring science based medicine fits in nicely with this movement.
It's not a political thing at all, I'd say it's on both sides of the isle.
I'll add the fear of GMO food in the list. To be fair though, Europeans behave much more stupidly when it comes to GMO.
The biggest obviously is Jenny McCarthy.
But some may surprise you such as the Foo Fighters who said AIDS wasn't real, I think they revered that point of view but I am not sure.
It pretty sad when one profoundly dumb celebrity can cause so much harm to so many people.
I would like to believe most people would want the best for the kids
I'll believe it started out that way, but now I think people have a narrative to support, the well-being of their kids be damned. Not that the anti-vaccination folk would say so in so many words, but after the guy behind the original study admitted it was faked, how else to explain it? Jenny McCarthy isn't going to back away from the only shred of relevance she has left. And those Mommies and Daddies who have been so shrill all this time? Many reasonable people change their minds every day on topics as they digest new information, but I argue that the people that look to Playboy models for their medical advice aren't reasonable people. So you're probably not going to get a lot of "mea culpa"s out of them.
Only positive thing about measles - you theoretically only get it once.
This is why near-universal vaccinations are so important, and why anti-vaxxers are responsible for allowing these diseases to continue to spread.
Thanks to all the anti-vaxxer "do your own research" garbage people.
…can also be interpreted as…
Thanks to all the anti-vaxxer people and their "do your own research" garbage.
That is, the garbage is the "do your own research" rejection of expertise, not the people themselves.
Participating in group discussions requires charitable reading, so if a 1st way of reading the comment makes you so disgusted you must storm out in protest, but a 2nd way of reading the comment lets you continue to participate, you should consider adopting the 2nd interpretation.
But perhaps, given the existence of 'garbage people' as a separately-occurring slur, you've read it as the writer intended. [And indeed I now see a confirmation from the original author, that labeling anti-vaxxers as 'garbage people' was their intent.]
Still, it's a throwaway bit of word-choice to indicate the speaker's anger and disgust at the situation. They (and their up-voters) likely believe, and with some justification, that the choices of these anti-vax people have put their own health at risk.
A bit of anger is natural in that situation, and language only has so many ways to express anger against others' practices. Every way of expressing that anger will in some way be seen as a slur against those people, lowering their relative-status, rejecting their choices, and rallying others to take corrective actions.
As long as those corrective actions don't include actually treating people like 'garbage' – destroying/disposing them – such adjectival choices should usually be forgiven as concise rhetorical flourishes. Most of the world communicates in such sloppy, emotional ways. Enforcing a standard of clinical precision and coolness, and careful word-choice against any ugly implications against any humans, would in fact exile many people, with valid perspectives, from your conversations.
As of 2016-08-28, we have reached a point where the most upvoted comment on a popular post is vilifying ignorant people as "garbage". That means the problem is not one person or a small group of people; the majority of the active users on the site endorse such dehumanizing tactics. Of course, like everyone else, without listening to you, they won't be able to tell when they're actually the mistaken ones. But they won't be able to listen to you if they begin the process by deciding that you are subhuman scum.
Consequently, dialogue is impossible.
The best way to bring about change, barring immediate decisive action by moderators here, does not involve trying to bring it about on this website. It has become part of the problem. Maybe it always was by its very nature.
Edit: for clarity
I guess that makes me one of those garbage people.
I have no idea how it works in Europe. But it could be a question of age. Measles was once so common that people over a certain age in the US are simply assumed to have had it at some point. That is, vaccinations aren't recommended for them because they are unnecessary.
My parents certainly don't hold any strong feelings about it, so I guess it wasn't recommended at this point in time? I don't know.
that makes me an anti-vaxxer regarding those two
Conforming to the recommended vaccination regime for your area, whilst avoiding unnecessary vaccinations that are not recommended by medical authorities, sounds quite the opposite of an anti-vaxxer.
In the US, the CDC recommends 4 lifetime doses of IPV (usually administered as three doses between the ages of 2 and 18 months, with a booster shot when the child begins preschool or kindergarten (4-6 years old)). The schedule in other countries in which polio has been eliminated is similar. Some countries will even require evidence of the vaccination schedule in order to grant entry to travelers.
The only countries in which this is not the recommendation are countries in which polio is either endemic or circulating through vaccine-derived cases, in which case OPV is used instead of IPV.
In that case I agree, going against the CDC advice is an anti-vaxxer stance.
yet here we are and I don't see those diseases making big comebacks
Polio has had flare-ups where vaccination levels have dropped (many of these because it's hard to deliver vaccines in a warzone), so if an imported case of polio coincided with an area of low herd immunity thanks to anti-vaxxers, I can see how a flare-up could easily occur in the USA.
To clarify that, the current problem is not that it's hard to deliver vaccines in a warzone (we've been doing that in various countries for 2+ decades, which is how we've gotten to current infection levels).
The problem is that the CIA decided to use polio vaccination as a front for gathering intelligence for bin Laden's assasination, and now people in Afghanistan and Pakistan don't trust actual vaccination efforts[0].
And unfortunately, this is not just limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan:
> The blowback from the raid may well have extended beyond Pakistan. Health specialists say the suspicion, anger, and violence that some Pakistanis and Taliban militants directed at health care workers after news leaked about the CIA-orchestrated vaccination campaign may have contributed to the spread of polio in Pakistan and war-torn parts of Syria and Iraq
[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150227-polio-paki...
FYI, polio has not been eradicated. It's been eliminated from all but eight countries, and is endemic on only two of those. But it has not yet been eradicated.
> I am 45 years old and never had a smallpox or polio vaccine, so that makes me an anti-vaxxer regarding those two, yet here we are and I don't see those diseases making big comebacks?
Well, don't travel to Afghanistan or Pakistan.
More seriously: you can't contract polio without being exposed to it[1]. There is no poliovirus in the US (outside laboratory settings), so you wouldn't have had the chance to contract it.
That state (the situation in which there is no poliovirus in the US) would not have been achieved without the vaccine, though, so you are still benefiting from the vaccine's use.
[1] whether in the wild or in vaccine-derived cases
It should have been something you got as a kid, as an oral vaccine, back in the 1970s.
Polio vaccination for an adult living in a developed country is neither necessary nor recommended.
"Routine vaccination against smallpox ended in the United States in the early 1970s as its incidence lessened." http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-sm... . You are too young to have warranted receiving a smallpox vaccine.
[1]"Dr. Thompson has admitted in taped phone conversations and in a statement through his lawyer, that he and other authors of the study, which include senior officials at CDC, manipulated the data and violated study protocol to conceal their findings linking the MMR vaccine to autism." http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/05/03/836249/...
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2275444
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01425.x
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X01...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15259839
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-006-0157-3
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Though the article is a great example of how this type of misinformation can propagate and sound scary and true if you're already predisposed to believe its stance, so is still interesting to read from that perspective.
The mmr-autism link is so thoroughly debunked that to keep repeating it is the dishonest in the extreme. The man that invented it has been shown to be an outright fraud, his research unethical and his ability to practice medicine taken from him.
A man who had a patent for a measles vaccine had to discredit that vaccine in order to be able to sell his own.
Andrew Wakefield was hired by a lawyer -paid hundreds of thousands of dollars- to discredit MMR.
He forged the data. He took samples without consent. He performed unnecessary tests and didn't get ethics panel approval.
Hopefully trolling.