According to the CDC about one in twenty children with measles will develop dangerous pneumonia. A form of encephalitis that causes convulsions and can leave the child deaf or mentally retarded strikes about one in a thousand, and one or two of each thousand will die. Measles spreads through the air and the virus can persist on surfaces for hours. Also according to the CDC, “[m]easles is so contagious that if one person has it, 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.”
You can only guess what happened when some denier marched her little vector around Disneyland last month. In all seriousness, if you still have anxiety about vaccinations then vaccinate your kids and get therapy for the anxiety.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Assholes…
Emily68
Back in the 1950s, before measles vaccine, I gave the measles to all the kids in my Sunday School class.
Pee Cee
My main anxiety was that my kid would run into the spawn of one of these douchenozzles before she was old enough for her vaccinations. If there’s one thing I can’t stand even more than libertarians, it’s anti-vaxxers.
rlrr
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Exactly. There are children, that for legitimate medical reason, can’t be vaccinated. These kids rely on everyone else getting vaccinated to protect them. Parents who don’t get their kids vaccinated for bullshit reasons are putting these kids at risk, along with their own.
Woodrowfan
@Emily68:
wost Christmas gift exchange EVER!
beergoggles
Is it too late to make them wear a scarlet A (for asshole) on their clothes?
C.V. Danes
Sounds like some people need to overcome their herd mentality to restore our herd immunity…
Mike in NC
@Pee Cee: I’d bet a huge number of those anti-vaxxers are glibertarians, too.
MomSense
We just found out over break that my my son’s friend had whooping cough and that is why he was out of school for so long and couldn’t come over over the vacation. I would never have guessed that they were anti-vaxxers.
Tim F.
@Mike in NC: Sadly many of them are liberals. It overlaps with the organic natural Whole Foods crowd.
Seriously, never go to a Whole Foods in California. Or anywhere else if you value your paycheck, but especially CA.
dmsilev
So, hypothetically speaking, if I have a kid is too young for the vaccine and they catch measles from a kid whose parents refused to vaccinate because tin-foil-hat, am I justified in pressing charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon? How about willful distribution of weapons of mass destruction?
dedc79
@MomSense: Do you know for certain that they are anti-vaxxers, or might they have been the victim of other anti-vaxxers?
These vaccines aren’t always 100% effective, and part of the problem with the anti-vaccine folks is that they increase the likelihood that even children who have been vaccinated will contract some of these illnesses.
Mnemosyne
@Tim F.:
I’m starting to think anti-vax is the left-wing version of gun-hugging on the right. There’s the same irrationality, the same insistence that their feelings are more important than other people, the same waving of poorly-sourced studies.
MomSense
@dedc79:
Their five kids haven’t had any vaccines.
PIGL
@MomSense: … Then their five children should be apprehended and the parents should be in prison.
Elizabelle
@C.V. Danes:
You beat me to it! I was going to say “herd mentality trumps herd immunity.”
Glad this is getting discussed.
TriassicSands
@Emily68:
So young, and already with an accomplishment worthy of a lifetime achievement award.
I assume you had to move out of state…
Elizabelle
@MomSense: Keep us posted on whether they stay anti-vaxxers. I’d imagine whooping cough in their home was pretty scary.
Original Lee
Unless the initial vector was too young to be vaccinated, I hope that the parents are scared straight from this. Original Teenager was one of the 1 in 3000 who got measles from the MMR. Poor kid was really sick for five days, with a fever we were barely able to keep in the 102-103 range, and then for a week after that we had to stay home until the spots went away. We were lucky.
ruemara
I have a wonderful, intelligent friend who has had her first child. She’s also a militant anti-vaxxer. God as my witness, I’m working hard to educate her on the issues with her stance and the factual science. But being helpful, truthful without being as blunt as I’d like to be is paining me.
icedfire
Everyone here should start spreading this cartoon far and wide, though it may be wise to save and share rather than link when dealing with certain glibertarian types.
Cacti
Measles kill about as many people every 3 weeks as the Ebola outbreak has killed in total.
trollhattan
@Tim F.:
It may well have begun, probably did begin, as a yuppie fixation but I can assure all that anti-vaxing has taken deep root with the wingnuttiest of the winger class–those who escape to rural enclaves and wait for the rest of us to crash society. Take a gander at California’s reddest rural counties.
wenchacha
I share this story a bunch: my uncle, born in the 20s, was too young to have been vaccinated for whopping cough, even if there had been one at the time. He suffered irreparable brain damage. He lived into his 70s, always cared for by his siblings and their families. It was a lifetime commitment, aided in part by the small estate left by my grandfather.
It was clear to me that my uncle would have been a bright man; he was interested in nature and machines. He had his own patterns of speech and grammar that all his relatives learned and spoke, with humor. He was greatly loved, but also presented more and greater difficulties for the family as he aged.
While caring for a disabled loved-one can be a blessing, it had its times of being a curse to my mom and her sisters. These women still cared for him in their homes in their late 70s, which was often a burden. It is not something I would wish for anyone, ever.
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
@Mnemosyne:
It doesn’t seem to be a terribly partisan trend. I know of plenty of right wingers who are just as adamantly anti-vax, with mistrust of government and hoity-toity experts being their man impetus for skipping vaccines. It’s a brand of stupid that crosses over political lines.
Capri
@wenchacha:
That’s the irony of the anti-vaccine movement. If the diseases were as common now as they were before vaccines were developed everyone would realize how horrible they are and want to protect their kids in any way possible. It’s the success of the vaccination programs that allows parents to believe that not protecting your kids is a rational way of going through life.
Big ole hound
Governor Christie, where are you (kissing Jerry Jones’ ass) I say we enforce the same rules for measles as for ebola. Isolate all those exposed for 2 weeks, by force if necessary This threat alone should stop the anti-vaxxers.
gene108
What is interesting, from a liberal political perspective, about anti-vaxxers is they are adults young enough to have children, who need vaccines, i.e. the adults are probably in their 20’s and maybe 30’s and have and have an overwhelming distrust of authority, such as science, government regulation, etc.
There is a feeling the government has been captured by commercial interests and cannot be trusted to keep you safe and science is a tool of commercial interests, producing inventions to make money for the pay masters and the expense of everyone else’s health, such as GMO crops.
Thinking that the youngin’s are a natural fit for a liberal agenda that will rely on a more robust government response to things like poverty and education needs to keep in mind plenty of them may not care about gay marriage, are not terribly racist, etc., but this does not mean they will support your economic and policy agenda, i.e. they have trust issues with what you are selling.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@Capri: In ways it is similar to the impact unions had in the creation of the “Reagan Democrats”.
An older group of people who had done well with decent paying jobs good working conditions allowing for a good middle class lifestyle along with the accumulation of a nest egg that forgot why they were able to do so and bought into the siren song of low taxes.
Was talking to a friends mother abt vacines when i discoveted that she had contracted polio as a child, had spent some time in an iron lung and describing other wretched treatments endured.
Those that forget the past…
gvg
yes a generation young enough to have been impacted by finding out their government tortured and spies on them might be a tiny bit cynical about government.
They don’t realized vaccinations come from science not especially the government. Of course government has a lot of reasons to want people to live healthy and not to have health crisis’s so government support vaccinations. There is also not much if any money to be made on vaccinations but a lot of people don’t realize that.
GMO from what I read was so general a term that it actually doesn’t tell you anything about if you should worry or not. I find the anti GMO people to be rather silly. Specific methods or processes or products may be problematical but not the who set of techniques. There is more good than bad about it and each case depends on it’s own set of facts. Condeming the whole is lazy.
ruemara
@gvg: Jesus christ. This has nothing to do with spying. It’s not even the same goddamn generation.
Stella B.
A kid introduces more antigens into her body every time she falls down and skins her knees than she gets from the complete series of childhood immunizations.
D58826
ot but looks like FSM is alive and well. There have been a series of earthquakes in Irving Tx the past couple of days. Well it seems
need something to giggle over on this cold day
Elie
Its also about narcissism. I don’t trust science so I just make up my own to fit my needs. Herd immunity and the impact on others is not important. I and my child are the center of the universe where I make up the rules that I want without looking to anyone else for permission.
Most of them will “get away with it” — they or their kids won’t get sick or make anyone else sick – while they are children. The older they get, the more they travel and interact with the world, the more likely they will get one of these so called “childhood” illnesses. These are horrible to get as children but much worse as adults.
I am not sure what the answer is. We live in an evermore interconnected world where doing your own thing is going to be more difficult without consequences on others who are not going to make it ok. There are so many people now with a sense of entitlement, its not going to be long before law suits against anti-vaccers or other exclusions are going to happen.
catclub
@Kryptik, A Man Without a Country: Distrust of the Federal Reserve also crosses left-right lines. Also nimby anti- Cape Wind feelings.
Citizen_X
I prefer “vector-Americans.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
Last I heard a poll, anti-vaxx is equal along all political lines.
@Mike in NC:
It’s big in places like Orange County, so… yeah.
Helmut Monotreme
@Citizen_X: They’re into habitat conservation for endangered species. The species is measles and the habitat is unvaccinated humans, but the principle is the same.
Elizabelle
@Citizen_X:
vector-Americans!
That’s perfect.
Elizabelle
@wenchacha: Thanks for sharing that story. It’s heartbreaking and says a lot about family bonds too.
Elizabelle
@D58826: Keep us posted.
I would love it if an earthquake put a big, expensive crack through somebody’s ranch house wall in Crawford, TX.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Kryptik, A Man Without a Country:
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that anti-vaxxers only show up on the left. More that their rationales remind me a lot of gun-huggers, and there are a whole lot more anti-vaxxers on the left than there are gun-huggers.
Tenar Darell
I grew up on stories of my father’s best friend dying of polio within about 48 hours in the early fifties. He also had another really good friend who survived polio, but had varying degrees of post polio syndrome for the rest of his life. I do not have kind thoughts for people who don’t vaccinate. The most polite comment I could make is that they are ignorant and therefore irresponsible.
The problem with the anti-vaxxers is that they are able to take not only lies (like about the MMR) but small truths and build an edifice of denial on top of them. For an example of small truth, take the polio infection rates from the oral live virus vaccine (OPV) before it was discontinued. (The switch over to only using the dead virus injection after infection rates for wild polio had receded was debatably excessively slow in developed countries which were no longer experiencing wild outbreaks). Added to that, these diseases have became so very rare that “nobody dies from X anymore!” is an all too common refrain. Anti-vaxxers then entangle personal sovereignty and autonomy issues into a horrid edifice where communal responsibility and the protective instincts from seeing so many die from terrible diseases no longer exists, and behold, the diseases re-appear.
I have a moderate amount of empathy for parents who are informed that they must or must not do this, that, or the other thing to their child even before it is born, and then they are whipsawed by directives to inject multiple complicated and unknown substances into their child afterwards. However, individuals who choose not to vaccinate, ought to learn about the diseases they take so lightly before they decide not to vaccinate. It’s not like we have school nurses anymore, who could at least determine if a sniffling kid was legitimately feverish and should be sent home. I really don’t want to go back to the era when whole swimming pools and movie theaters had to close because of one person with polio or measles showing up in a community. Or where asymptomatic individuals had to be forcibly quarantined and those who couldn’t afford vaccines couldn’t participate in school. (Etcetera, etcetera).
IIRC this NOVA documentary about vaccines and their long history and the present denialism was pretty good. And it might convince a worried parent on the fence to avoid full blown denial.
The Notorious PIG
The anti-vaxxers I know are complete demographic outliers: wealthy, PhD educated (mom in physics, dad in engineering), self-identified libertarians (they literally own the the full Ayn Rand Library!!! even her criticism!), and New Age-y in their spiritual beliefs.
The gist of their claims seems to be:
1. there’s all these new fangled vaccines I didn’t have as a kid and I turned out fine
2. they never did double blind randomized trials so the science for vaccines is questionable at best
3. the cost-benefit analysis clearly shows that your risk of complications from the vaccine is greater than your risk from the disease
(when pressed on what happens if lots of people take this advice and the probability of the unvaccinated actually contracting the disease goes way up, the light briefly went on but putting the abstract math of a critical threshold for diffusion against the hard belief that All Good Flows From Individual Self-Interest resulted in a “I’ll need to think about that more” )
chopper
If only you could vaccinate for stupid.
icedfire
@chopper: You can. Why do you think the GOP is so anti-education?
Pee Cee
@Kryptik, A Man Without a Country:
Right. While I know that there are plenty of left-leaning anti-vaxxers, the only ones I actually know in real life are right-wingers. Some libertarian (a two-fer of assholishness), the others straight-up conservative.
sm*t cl*de
There seems to be a concerted effort from Wingnuttia to co-opt the antivax position and make it another rightwing purity test. E.g. Bachmann on Gardasil.
Cluttered Mind
@Tim F.: Which is amusing when you consider that the owner of Whole Foods is the worst kind of glibertarian.
sgaile-beairt
only anti-vaxxers I ever met were conservative religious types who were against it because “prolife” — there is a small but vocal faction who object to the original vaccine lines cultivated in fetal tissue, & ironic because this is the best way to kill off your own or someone else’s born children.