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Apr. 12th, 2008 12:19 pmI haven't written anything vaguely soci-political in a good, long while here. After Obama's amazing speech on race, and reading a lot of David Neiwert's work and noticing some people using words like "reverse racism" and "the race card" more often. I had an idea for an entry called "Code Words: 'I'm not racist, but...', or How To Tell If Someone Is Being A Toolbag"...
...but root pretty much beat me to it.
That's alright, I found something else to have my head nearly explode about in the Grey Lady herself:
No, self-centered, dangerous jerks. Only someone who lives in our era of modern medicine could underestimate the incredible danger and misery that diseases like measles cause. Over decades, caring parents made certain to get their children immunized and to keep their shots up to date, and as a result, kids grew up healthy and deadly disease-free. And now, parents think they care about their kids by keeping them from vaguely specified chemicals (I don't know, handwavium or soe such)
'the government puts in the immunizations', and as a result, kids are starting to come down with diseases we'd thought we nearly eradicated.
Sadly, that's not even the most fucked up thing in the article. Ready?
Measles party. A frigging MEASLES party. Where did she get her parenting advice from, South Park episodes ?
So, she won't vaccinate her child due to unspecified and unsubstantiated fears, but she will deliberately infect him with a potentially-dangerous disease, putting him at a much higher risk of serious health problems than the vaccine would, and turning him into a vector for spreading the disease for others? The effectiveness of measles vaccine attenuates over time. The reason we had succeeded in virtually eradicated the disease is that the primary reservoirs were children; once you made that pool immune, the disease had nowhere to live and spread to adults who had never gotten it.
If your kid is too young for a vaccine, or has a sincere medical reason for not getting vaccinated, that's one thing. If you don't vaccinate your children because of ill-defined and vague health risks that are utterly unsupported by scientific evidence, yes, you are a bad parent. You are going to refuse to incur the tiniest potential risk to their child while increasing a greater risk to everyone - often to people more susceptible than their own kids. As the article makes clear, these are not poor people nor ar are they denied basic educatiopn.That whole article that profiles the parents leads me to one of three conclusions:
News flash: bacteria don't really care about how you felt when you were making your uninformed, negligent decision. You are still a dangerous, self-centered toolbag if your un-vaccinated kid gets rubella or becomes a carrier for whooping cough and infects thier classmates.
I've heard and read some very intelligent people spout otherwise between a vaccination and link to autism. The idea that autism, as damaging as it is, represents an equal public health risk to diseases such as measles the mumps is foolish. More to the point, it's irrelevant, as the autism-inoculation link has been rather thoroughly refuted. There is no evidence for the purported thimerosal-autism link (the recent VAERS case on Hannah Poling did not find a link between vaccines and autism; they found that giving the child nine catch-up vaccines on the same day might have exacerbated a previously unrecognized mitochondrial disorder that led to seizures and encephalopathy with "autism-like" symptoms)-- since thermisol was phased out of vaccines in 2001, there has been no resultant decrease in reported incidences of autism.
I'll be thrice-double-damned if I'm quiet while someone makes the world more dangerous to me because THEY'RE being stupid.
...but root pretty much beat me to it.
That's alright, I found something else to have my head nearly explode about in the Grey Lady herself:
In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, and the other three were too young to receive vaccines.
The parents who objected to their children being inoculated are among a small but growing number of vaccine skeptics in California and other states who take advantage of exemptions to laws requiring vaccinations for school-age children.
The exemptions have been growing since the early 1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public health officials and physicians find disturbing.
...
Every state allows medical exemptions, and most permit exemptions based on religious practices. But an increasing number of the vaccine skeptics belong to a different group — those who object to the inoculations because of their personal beliefs, often related to an unproven notion that vaccines are linked to autism and other disorders.
What self-centered jerks.No, self-centered, dangerous jerks. Only someone who lives in our era of modern medicine could underestimate the incredible danger and misery that diseases like measles cause. Over decades, caring parents made certain to get their children immunized and to keep their shots up to date, and as a result, kids grew up healthy and deadly disease-free. And now, parents think they care about their kids by keeping them from vaguely specified chemicals (I don't know, handwavium or soe such)
'the government puts in the immunizations', and as a result, kids are starting to come down with diseases we'd thought we nearly eradicated.
Sadly, that's not even the most fucked up thing in the article. Ready?
In the wake of last month’s outbreak, Linda Palmer considered sending her son to a measles party to contract the virus. Several years ago, the boy, now 12, contracted chicken pox when Ms. Palmer had him attend a gathering of children with that virus.
Measles party. A frigging MEASLES party. Where did she get her parenting advice from, South Park episodes ?
So, she won't vaccinate her child due to unspecified and unsubstantiated fears, but she will deliberately infect him with a potentially-dangerous disease, putting him at a much higher risk of serious health problems than the vaccine would, and turning him into a vector for spreading the disease for others? The effectiveness of measles vaccine attenuates over time. The reason we had succeeded in virtually eradicated the disease is that the primary reservoirs were children; once you made that pool immune, the disease had nowhere to live and spread to adults who had never gotten it.
If your kid is too young for a vaccine, or has a sincere medical reason for not getting vaccinated, that's one thing. If you don't vaccinate your children because of ill-defined and vague health risks that are utterly unsupported by scientific evidence, yes, you are a bad parent. You are going to refuse to incur the tiniest potential risk to their child while increasing a greater risk to everyone - often to people more susceptible than their own kids. As the article makes clear, these are not poor people nor ar are they denied basic educatiopn.That whole article that profiles the parents leads me to one of three conclusions:
- They are wealthy and educated people who either presume they know more than health professionals (The "Arrogant Toolbag") or
- They understand perfectly well and are leeching health off others (The Craven Opportunistic Toolbag) or
- They are both Arrogant AND Craven, Opportunistic Toolbags.
News flash: bacteria don't really care about how you felt when you were making your uninformed, negligent decision. You are still a dangerous, self-centered toolbag if your un-vaccinated kid gets rubella or becomes a carrier for whooping cough and infects thier classmates.
I've heard and read some very intelligent people spout otherwise between a vaccination and link to autism. The idea that autism, as damaging as it is, represents an equal public health risk to diseases such as measles the mumps is foolish. More to the point, it's irrelevant, as the autism-inoculation link has been rather thoroughly refuted. There is no evidence for the purported thimerosal-autism link (the recent VAERS case on Hannah Poling did not find a link between vaccines and autism; they found that giving the child nine catch-up vaccines on the same day might have exacerbated a previously unrecognized mitochondrial disorder that led to seizures and encephalopathy with "autism-like" symptoms)-- since thermisol was phased out of vaccines in 2001, there has been no resultant decrease in reported incidences of autism.
I'll be thrice-double-damned if I'm quiet while someone makes the world more dangerous to me because THEY'RE being stupid.
