- Other idiots like yourself who chose not to vaccinate their child and their very unlucky children.
- Vaccinated people (because a vaccine is never 100% effective).
- Babies too young to be vaccinated.
And of course, you are taking part in resurrecting a disease that had been officially announced as eradicated in 2000.
Good job, anti vaccine people, you ignorant, medieval retards.
s/safe/effective
Also, I think you should rewrite your post without the insulting words in it. Writing it as such may be cathartic, but it is ineffective in convincing anyone.
I picked my wording very carefully. I'm not one to use insults lightly but this topic enrages me. It's one thing to make choices that are detrimental to yourself, it's worse to make such choices that impact your children (who are helpless) but I think it's the ultimate disgrace to make choices that endanger the entire population.
Vaccination is not the same, unless you intend to quarantine your kids forever.
What others decide to do to themselves within a safe context that does not endanger my self or others is the business of the consenting adults involved as long as it is only them involved.
I fully support legalizing, regulating, and taxing everything. Some things might be too dangerous to allow outside of carefully setup environments.
There will of course be things that someone could come up with which shouldn't be allowed and obvious reasons for that. However there are vastly many things which are safe, or dangerous mostly because they are not legal, and may be interesting that are not presently legal in many places.
a lot of the time i see this sort of rage surface most assuredly (in myself and other people) for topics which:
a.i am definitely not guilty
b.someone else definitely is guilty
c.a lot of other people agree with me.. but not everyone
as to your stated arguments, do you really think anti-vaxers want to make bad choices for their children? or are you saying you should be judged according the outcomes of actions, whether you had the correct foresight or not? the first is demonising them to make yourself feel superior / the second is demonising all parents for the myriad of things they do everyday to damage their children. which is it?
"I think it's the ultimate disgrace to make choices that endanger the entire population." once again here, is the prior knowledge / intent important? here if you are suggesting, foresight or not, it is bad to endanger the human race - as a logical test of sorts, what if it turns out that overpopulation is the biggest danger to the human race? would that change your stance? likewise, if intent is important, do you stop driving your suv? or is it just about scale? do you stop using fossil fuels?
the thing that gets me about the vax/antivax, is that neither side really understand the complexity of the argument. i actually know as many people whose children have had serious reactions to vaccinations as i do parents who children have had serious preventable illnesses. now, i know statistically this is due to vaccines preventing a whole lot more illnesses, and that for certain illnesses there is a minimum threshold of vaccinated people below which the effectiveness is seriously compromised. but at this very point what does it matter to the parents if they have just as much chance to hurt their child either way?
most anti-vaxers i have run into actually want to pick and choose the vaccinations and the timing, rather than the couple of hundred they are forced to get by the state (in three or four different injections). is it better to get all or none? is it better to force them into a position of getting all or none?
if you don't understand your own arguments, or the people you are trying to convince otherwise, how do you know you are not just reacting emotionally? who does it serve for you to get enraged?
*(because clearly it is just a stats vs economics thing, hardly something to get riled up about)
I am selfishly enraged by the actions of people who put my children's health at risk (especially since they were premature and they are prone to catching a lot of bad stuff) because these people choose to ignore facts (most of the time for religious reasons).
I am selflessly enraged at anyone who endangers other people because I have empathy for these people and very low tolerance for irrationality.
what you are talking about is an issue of scale.. grey area stuff. a compounding issue of lots of people choosing to do something that collectively causes a major problem. not unlike driving as it happens (ie. chance of accident, increase in pollution). 1.3 million people died last year as a result of car accidents. have you looked into the correlation between driven kilometres and car accidents? do you care?
you did not answer my questions. are you selfishly enraged at only actions which you do not engage in, that put your childrens health at risk? how otherwise is this not just an emotional argument? who does it serve for you to get enraged?
Of course not, they think they are doing the right thing, in much the same way that Mormons refuse blood transfusions for themselves and their children or that certain parents kill their children so they can get to heaven faster.
You're still building a straw man, though.
The intention is completely irrelevant here, what matters is the safety of the children and of the rest of the population.
so how do you differentiate between "intention is completely irrelevant" and (from your other comment) "because these people choose to ignore facts". are we back to thinking that they are 'choosing' in bad faith? they believe because they do not understand. surely the way to reach them is to build an understanding rather than get angry at them about their beliefs.
You're trying to use anecdotal data as data. That's not how science works.
Scientist are way, way ahead of you. Adverse effects are the number one thing that is studied when a new vaccine is being considered for public use. At least in the US (and most of the industrialized world), if a vaccine receives approval for wide use, it's because the statistical risk of adverse effects and the actual adverse effects are completely benign compared to the positive effect that the vaccine will have on the population.
at a certain point with the effectiveness of vaccines, the adverse effects actually start to outnumber the people still being effected. the point at which people start to notice this is perhaps an order of magnitude lower than the reality. science is not how people work, they use anecdata. now, how do you interact with those people?
or do you care more about getting all self-righteous and angry?
Source for that?
It is not the same chance, not for a mile
There are a bunch of other words you could use: "idiots" fits nicely.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/adult.htm...
At least in the US, these are available in most states at the pharmacy and are usually covered by insurance. Pertussis in particular is a leading vaccine preventable cause of death worldwide. So at least be up to date on your Tdap.
Most people who did not vaccinate their children were getting mixed messages from the media. A lot of English newspaper coverage was very unclear and there was plenty that was campaigning against MMR and for individual vaccinations.
You know that science understanding in the feneral population is low. You know that science reporting, even from reputable media outlets, is piss poor.
There's an extra factor here. Science reporting is terrible and that includes when the reporter has access to honest researchers telling the truth and a unified story. In the MMR case they had a crooked researcher telling them lies.
Andrew Wakefield had developed a single measles vaccine. For that to be sucessful he needed to stop people using the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield was hired as an expert witness in a law case to prove that there was a causal link between MMR and disease. He was paid over £400,000 - and those are 1990s pounds.
His deceitful paper was published (although later retracted) in a well known respected peer-reviewed journal. Newspaper gave it coverage as a credible paper.
http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html
It's not that surprising to see people react in the way they did in the face of this determined crookery.