One of the things I hate about the anti-vaxxers is they make me feel like an authoritarian scumbag because I am infringing on their right to be idiots or whatever. I am totally fine with people being idiots, so long as their idiocy does not impact other people’s behavior. So if skipping vaccines hurt only you, that would be fine. You can drop dead if you want. But that’s not how it works, and when you refuse to be vaccinated because your healing crystals have you covered and blah blah blah Jenny McCarthy, you put other people at risk.
And it’s like that with so many things. Guns and drunk driving and meth come to mind. At heart, I’m really about letting people do what they want, just so long as it isn’t hurting anyone. It’s one of the reasons I have never understood why straight people give two hoots in hell what LGBTQ people do or who they sleep with or whether they get married, etc.
I’m also not SCIENCE UBER ALLES. I mean, I think from a policy perspective and 99% of the time in my personal choices, following the scientific evidence is the way to go. But hey, science also discusses the placebo effect, and science also doesn’t have answers for everything- yet. Which is why if people want to go to chiropractors, even though I think they are quacks, whatever. Same with cupping, and acupuncture, and other shit. Maybe it’s just the attention or touch from others that helps people. Maybe it makes them calmer in the head. I don’t know, but if it makes people happy and ISN’T HURTING ANYONE, again, whatever floats your boat.
Hell, I use CBD oil daily. There is, to my knowledge, no real scientific evidence that it works. But since I started a couple months ago, my knees and fingers feel better, and I have not woken up ONCE with a frozen shoulder, something that used to be an every night occurrence. I also think I am a little less anxious. It’s almost imperceptible, but when I lie down at night to fall asleep I just feel a little less, I dunno, worked up. Maybe something in the oil has made a change. Maybe I just think there is a difference because I am doing something about it. Maybe I started sleeping differently. Maybe I’m just nuts? Who knows? If it stops working or if I think it stops working, I’ll stop doing it. But I’m not hurting anyone or hurting myself, so, who cares.
That’s what we should be getting back to in this country, along with a renewed concern for our fellow man. We should start helping people more, and we should stop worrying about what kind of harmless other shit people are doing just because it irritates us. That’s another thing- these white women freaking out about a couple black kids in a pool somewhere. Maybe they aren’t supposed to be there. Maybe they are. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU CARE? It’s just some kids trying to not be fucking hot in the middle of summer. Leave them the fuck alone.
ehh whatever.
trnc
Pretty much sums it up for me. FWIW, I know a couple of acupuncture and chiropractor users who were pretty skeptical about them until they tried it out. I can’t vouch for those methods because I haven’t used them, but I’m less inclined now to think it’s all BS.
Patricia Kayden
I wonder how anti-vaccination became such a huge thing. One of my good friends was yapping against vaccinations for some odd reason. I couldn’t even argue with her since this is an educated woman who otherwise is very intelligent. Sigh.
different-church-lady
Exercising power over other people is a hell of a drug.
different-church-lady
@Patricia Kayden: Once again, xkcd covers it.
Yarrow
We somehow managed to do it with smoking. It used to be people could smoke anywhere and non-smokers just had to deal. Little by little people determined that smokers doing what they wanted infringed on the health of non-smokers and laws were changed. So now in most places smokers can smoke they just can’t do it where it’s going to bother other people.
Yarrow
@Patricia Kayden: It’s a Russian op (active measures). No, no joking. It’s in some of the court documents. Make Americans sick to disrupt society.
Litlebritdifrnt
The only problem with that is anti-vaxxers put EVERYONE in danger. The herd thing and all that. The anti-vaxxers throw an infected child into the mix and someone ends up dead.
Baud
It hurts their minor children and the other children they come into contact with.
I’m not averse to being authoritarian, however. As long as it’s justified and no more than necessary to accomplish a public good.
trollhattan
The fact that essentially eradicated communicable diseases are reappearing, especially in schools, tells me everything I need to know about the “value” of making vaccinations optional. We had an ironic challenge to our state senator, who is an M.D. and author of vaccination legislation eliminating the religious exemption, by an anti-vaxxer. These folks love the attention but he got stomped last week anyway.
In two years since SB 277 passed CA kindergarten vaccination rates have gone from 90 to 95%.
Patricia Kayden
@different-church-lady: Ouch!!
@Yarrow: That makes sense.
trollhattan
@Baud:
IMO it’s equivalent to leaving guns laying around the house. Parental negligence.
Mnemosyne
It often seems like the anti-vaxxer parents are the same ones who become insane helicopter parents and insist on going to their teenage child’s job interview to answer all of the questions for them. They’re control freaks gone mad.
rust
As my old man likes to say, Americans have a fundamental right to be left alone. Reproductive rights, LBGTQ+, etc. Hell, if you want to drink unpasteurized milk, ride your Harley without a helmet and understand the risks? Go for it. But even he recognizes different rules when it starts to effect your neighbor.
Corner Stone
@Baud: Slippery slope!
Corner Stone
“Wray and Rod” sounds like the worst cop buddy TV series ever.
trollhattan
@Litlebritdifrnt:
It’s not commonly understood that vaccines are not equally effective for everybody who receives them and exposing others is a form of Russian roulette. How can we know our kid has adequate immunity?
So-called chicken pox* parties hosted by anti-vaxx parents are especially ghoulish. “It’s nature’s way.”
*Among many
Baud
@Corner Stone:
Measles-free slippery slope.
trollhattan
@Litlebritdifrnt:
[whoops, used a BAD FYWP word]
It’s not commonly understood that vaccines are not equally effective for everybody who receives them and exposing others is a form of Russian roo-lette [small kangaroo]. How can we know our kid has adequate immunity?
So-called chicken pox* parties hosted by anti-vaxx parents are especially ghoulish. “It’s nature’s way.”
*Among many
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
We have access to the vaccine rates of all area schools. The lowest rates are at the hippy and super-jeebuz schools, one of those sad ends-meet phenomena.
Corner Stone
@Baud: First you have Cole taking everyone’s guns. Now you have him jabbing everyone with a dull needle. What’s next? Regulating large banks? Restricting pollution dumping in our rivers? Where does this madness end?
LeeM
I doubt the conservative mind reasons the same as an open one. They think their mindset, opinion, tastes are correct, facts be damned. I need to tell our CFO to turn down Rush Limpbaugh now.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
With a better society?
CliosFanBoy
@Yarrow: actually a lot of popular conspiracy theories began as Soviet disinformation campaigns back when the USSR was around. They’d plant them in newspapers in the developing world that were dependent on Soviet subsidies to survive. The stories would get picked up by the press in other countries and spread around.
CliosFanBoy
@Corner Stone: or a pub in some little Scottish village
Corner Stone
@CliosFanBoy: I was going to go with best gay pron series but I was distracted for a moment.
Waynski
I worked with an an anti-vaxer, an otherwise smart guy, but when he told me he wasn’t getting his kids vaccinated my reaction was, “WTF is wrong with you?” I was sick A Lot when I was a kid…pneumonia, multiple bouts of bronchitis, flu. If it was communicable it found its way to me, and it was no damn picnic. I can’t imagine why you would risk it for your child.
Gbbalto
@trollhattan: I am old enough that this was how my parents dealt with chicken pox and measles. Of course we have effective vaccines now, not then.
Patricia Kayden
@Waynski: What was his reaction?
NotMax
Live and let live.
What a radical concept.
;)
Yarrow
@CliosFanBoy: They’re good at it, have plenty of experience. Just modernized it.
sdhays
@Baud: Diabolical!
J R in WV
John, a good paragraph or two. Anti-Vaccination parents should just lose their family until the uber-state gets all the kids completely vaccinated for everything. I remember bootcamp and the shot-line… I wish I even knew all the diseases I was vaccinated for! Dozens of them all at once, and none of us died!!!!
I bet my immune system got stomped into high gear for a while there.
Just recently I got a diptheria/tetanus/whooping cough booster, a pneumonia shot (my second one, the improved more varieties dose) and a shingles vaccination. My dad had that many years ago and believe me, you DO NOT WANT shingles. Such a non-threatening name for a terrible disorder.
Now I’m wanting the newer more effective shingles vaccine. I’m up for any vaccine they come up with. Nothing is as bad as dying miserably of a disease that was conquered totally by medical science years and years ago! How stupid can you get?!
Like the ignorant peasants of the third world, refusing to allow polio vaccinations in their villages, when with cooperation that disease could be made extinct, like smallpox.
That was a clue, by the way, that the “Caravan” attack from Latin America was a cruel hoax, when they told us the travelers were bringing us the smallpox!! Nope, not gonna come out of Latin America. Maybe out of a Russian germ warfare lab, but not out of rural villages, all gone now!
Brooklyn Dodger
@Patricia Kayden: I’d like to ask people who do this if they’ve ever heard of polio or tetanus. Big deal in my parents’ generation but maybe the history of public health went out the door with civics.
zhena gogolia
I wish my friends IRL didn’t watch so much cable news. Saturday night I was hearing that Pelosi should step aside because she’s “too much of a target.” Today at lunch it was, “People are getting their hopes up too much about Mueller. He’s not finding out anything.” I said, “There’ve been lots of indictments.” “But not of anybody important.” “Manafort?” “But not of Trump.”
oatler.
I use CBD oil myself but remain skeptical of its effects (maybe because I was expecting a righteous buzz?), Anyway I’m going to stick with it.
pacem appellant
I cannot overemphasis this: Get your damned vaccines! I have immunocompromised family members who rely on the herd immunity to stay healthy. It actually limits where they can, and especially cannot go. Imagine wanting to go to Disneyland, say, and realizing you can’t because some idiots have decided that measles vaccines are for chumps. Jackholes, the lot of them.
Yarrow
Why did Matt Drudge delete his entire Twitter account? Fox News still hasn’t tweeted since November 8. Weird.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
That’s a key part of it. The problem is that autism generally becomes obvious to lay observers around the same time when kids get a bunch of shots. People noticed the correlation and started blaming the shots for their kids being autistic. That evil quack, Andrew Wakefield, fabricated a bunch of data showing that their intuition was correct, and the whole thing snowballed. It doesn’t matter that the original correlation is wrong- scientists can now tell which children are autistic at birth- or that the original justification has now been lost. The idea that there’s something terribly wrong with autism has taken root, and the kind of people who think they can prevent anything bad from happening by being complete control freaks have now decided they need to skip immunizations.
dr. luba
@pacem appellant: I had a “conversation” on FB a while back with two antivaxxers who were FB friends of a co-worker of mine. My co-worker is a nurse. Her friends were two apparent sociopaths who, when I began to discuss herd immunity and the weak members of our society who depend on it, basically said “why should I put myself or my kids at risk for other people?”
That is the mindset you are dealing with: FYIGM.
eemom
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. played a big part in legitimizing antivaxx in the mid ’00s, and he has never recanted or apologized. Fucking asshole is a disgrace to his father’s memory.
Death Panel Truck
Be glad you don’t have to take Taltz injections for psoriatic arthritis. The needle has to stay in for 10 seconds and the goddamned things hurt like fucking hell, but at least my fingers and wrists feel better.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
It makes sense in a couple of ways. On the one hand, those may now be the only schools that will allow in kids who haven’t been immunized. On the other hand, the kind of people who were already sending their kids there are the kind who don’t trust the government to do right by their kids, who are exactly the kind of parent you’d expect to ignore rules about immunization.
Ruckus
Are you dissing Scalzi?
Or just tired of assholes?
schrodingers_cat
\@zhena gogolia:I gave up cable in 2011, because cable companies didn’t serve my little town. This town we moved to two years ago does get Comcast but no I don’t miss it at all and have subscribed again. It has been great for peace of mind.
J R in WV
Just one more thing:
Here in West Virginia, we have a great vaccination rate – your kids can’t get into public schools without a complete set of vaccinations!
I enrolled in public school in about 1955, and had classmates who had survived polio. Bent limbs, crutches, and they were the lucky kids, the unlucky ones were either dead or in an Iron Lung… you want to look that up. Kept alive by a thing like a coffin that uses air pressure to drive your lungs to draw fresh air in and out, because your muscles are permanently paralyzed. It works… but what a way to be trapped.
And propaganda in third world towns tells parents the polio vaccination will harm your kids in terrible ways! Instead of saving them from a terrible disease… and now we have idiots telling those stories here, too. Just plain old evil~!!!~
pacem appellant
@dr. luba: They’re putting themselves at risk, too. HERD immunity, not INDIVIDUAL immunity. Who let the libertarians into the anti-vax fold?
Corner Stone
@zhena gogolia:
IMO, that’s just truth. He better start dropping bombs over Baghdad or this isn’t going to matter worth a shit.
Quiltingfool
I started using cbd oil about a month ago. I have a left knee with no cartilage; the pain changed my gait and posture, so guess what! Sciatic nerve pain down my right hip and leg. Now I can’t say for sure cbd oil is a cure-all, but my knee pain is reduced, and so is the sciatic nerve pain. Constant pain reduces quality of life and drains energy. Again, I cannot say cbd oil will fix your pain issues, but for me, it sure seems to help. Right now, though, I’m saving money (got lots of handmade quilts that need new homes, lol) to get Synvisc injections, because my damned insurance company (Anthem BCBS) won’t cover it.
A Ghost To Most
@different-church-lady:
That’s why people cling to bullshit religions.
TS (the original)
@Roger Moore: They are indoctrinated. I have very close family who will not get their children vaccinated. It is like talking to a 100% trump supporter. They have every “fact” in their brains about the horrors of vaccination. The choice eventually becomes to have no contact with them – or not discuss it. The community hate against them reinforces their viewpoint. To be involved is heartbreaking. There is no-one to discuss it with – there is scorn and disgust from one side & a wall of “vaccination is dangerous” on the other side.
delk
A couple of weeks ago I was at my doctor’s office for a flu shot. I asked if I was up to date with all my vaccinations. After checking he ordered a blood test to screen for one of the hepatitis strains. The next day I got the blood test and as I left the office I tripped and fell. I broke my nose, T1 vertebra, and wrist. Now, had I been an anti-vaxxer…
West of the Rockies
I’ll sign on completely, Mr. Cole. Add climate-change deniers to the list, especially here in California, where apparently (if we weren’t such morons and tax leaches), we wouldn’t be having fires.
Roger Moore
@dr. luba:
The question isn’t “why should I put myself or my kids at risk for other people?”, it’s “why are you putting your kids at risk by refusing to protect them from potentially fatal diseases?”. As long as people see getting their shots as riskier than not getting them, they’ll refuse them. They need to be reminded that the diseases we immunize people against are genuinely dangerous, so getting your shots is safer than refusing them.
raven
What brand cbd oil? We got some for Lil Bit and saw no change in her so we switched it to Bohdi. He’s still walking a mile a day and hopping up on the couch but I don’t know what impact the oil has had? The boss and I have a number of aches and pain and we might try it.
Ruckus
@Waynski:
I’m old enough to have had all the normal diseases of the 50s/60s and prior. Except polio. But I knew people with it. Including a girl I was in 12 grades with. Everyone of those diseases now has a vaccination with great track records. Measles has had some rather shitty side effects, like encephalitis, which I had after the disease.
Kids not being vaccinated for these diseases should be criminal. It’s child abuse. And it’s a public safety issue.
A Ghost To Most
@oatler.: I get my CBD the old fashioned way – in very small doses from almost pure sativas.
chris
IMO Facebook has a lot to answer for on the vaccine front. I subscribe to r/vaxxhappened on Reddit, a WTF-is-wrong-with-these-people? sub that gathers and pokes fun at the antivaxers. At least half of the stuff comes from FB and all of it is fucking insane.
The Golux
I recently encountered an anti-vaxxer at a gathering of my wife’s family – her nephew. He went on and on about how perfectly logical his position was (it was as woo-woo as you could imagine), and nobody really gave him any pushback. His mother is complicit; she agreed to home-school his kids when they were forbidden from attending public school (they live in California). My wife’s niece (the daughter of a different brother) is a nurse and was absolutely livid; she left the area where the nephew was pontificating because she knew it was pointless to argue. She said to me, “I wanted to say to him, ‘Have you ever seen a child die from measles? Because I have.'”
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV:
Just FYI, I got the first dose of that last month, and was *really* sick for about 24 hours afterward. Apparently this is not uncommon. I’ll still get the second half next month, but forewarned is forearmed.
ArchTeryx
@Yarrow: When it comes to smoking, once (most) rich people bailed from smoking, it became the providence primarily of the poor. And that’s when all the no-smoking ordinances started going up. IMHO, it had little to do with how bad for you smoking was, and everything to do with the fact that it was abandoned by the rich because it *kills* you. The poor have very little to lose.
trollhattan
@eemom:
He premiered an anti-vaxx film here in town and in his speech declared vaccines to be “a holocaust.”
That went over well.
Yarrow
@The Golux:
More of this needs to be said to these idiots. Put them on the spot.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
In boot camp I spent a week in the hospital, starting the morning after shot line. Passed out in the chow line. Fever of 104, it went higher the next day. I get all the shots except the flu, because I’ve always gotten the flu from the shot, even when they said it wasn’t the active type. But I then react to some meds with symptoms that only 1-2% have. IOW, I’m weird. It’s OK though, I know it. I’m not used to it yet but at least I recognize it.
Embir
This post and the approach to others business is one of the reasons BJ is my favorite blog. Moar pleeze Mr Proprieter.
A Ghost To Most
@Gin & Tonic:
Sounds like your reaction to the vaccine was worse than my actual case this summer.
Jay
Wonkette does a deep dive into the Nazi Prom photo,…..
https://www.wonkette.com/wisconsin-school-district-says-nazi-salute-prom-photo-not-reflective-of-their-values
and finds lots and lots of Nazis.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Got the other one last year and it hurt like a motherfucker. Like, it hurt soon after the injection but after I got to the car it burned just like a wasp sting only from a wasp with a half-inch stinger. Sat for fifteen minutes before I felt safe to drive.
I understand the new one is more effective but I’m going to need some encouragement.
Martin
Cole needs a Trumpy Bear.
different-church-lady
@chris: Facebook has a lot to answer for on every front.
A Ghost To Most
.@Ruckus:
We were forced to get the swine flu in 77. Most of my squadron got sick as dogs.
The Golux
It’s the smug ignorance that really gets to you. I can’t think of any development in medicine that has been a bigger triumph than vaccines – maybe proper sanitation in hospitals, but I’d bet that the count for lives saved by vaccines is in the billions.
Yarrow
Oh, hey.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Did you see the Frontline on Facebook?
Ruviana
@CliosFanBoy: The U.S. did that in Latin America during their attack on the elected Guatemalan government back in the early 1950s.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
I knew 3 people with polio growing up. The aforementioned girl, who the last time I saw her walked without crutches and braces, and 2 of my friends moms. One had an iron lung in her dinning room, in place of the table and chairs.
Really it’s “My snowflakes are better than your shitty kids and I shouldn’t have to inflict this terrible concept of stopping your kid from getting a disease on my snowflake.” They never see the other direction.
Ohio Mom
@Roger Moore: There are actually two different vaccines-cause-autism “theories.”
The theory espoused by Wakefield concerned the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, which is a so-called “live” vaccine, where the viruses are weakened. He claimed the weakened viruses irritate the intestines, and in doing so, create large openings which allow viral molecules to enter the bloodstream and then enter the brain. Once in the brain, they supposedly wreck havoc. As you point out, this theory has been completely discredited.
The other theory concerns vaccines using viruses that have been inactivated. These vaccines come in multi-dose containers, and pediatrician offices’ fill many syringes from the container.
Obviously, after the first dose is removed, the container’s seal is broken; to preserve the vaccine their formulas once contained a type of mercury (there can be no mercury in live vaccines because it would inactivate the weakened viruses and make the vaccine ineffective).
The claim here is that mercury causes heavy metal poisoning, akin to lead poisoning. This theory recognizes that each dose only contains a small amount of mercury but claims that since babies and young children receive so many vaccines in a relatively short amount of time, the culmative mercury dose is dangerously high.
I don’t know if this second theory was ever thoroughly discredited but it doesn’t matter. The mercury preservative was removed from the children’ vaccine formulas (another preservative was substituted) in an attempt to placate the anti-vaxxers. Clearly, this effort did not have the desired effect.
There is still mercury in the flu shot and various other adult vaccines.
The things one learns as an autism mom (everyone on my family is up-to-date on their vaccines).
chris
@different-church-lady:
Agreed, I’m in the burn it to the ground camp.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
Yeah, lots of people here complained about the side effects. But I saw my dad eaten up with weeping sores and miserable. And my dad had a huge tolerance for pain, didn’t bother to get novocain at the dentist office. But was miserable from the shingles. So I’m going to get it as soon as possible.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Recently read Joni Mitchell had polio as a young girl and was kept in isolation for something like half a year with no physical contact with her parents.
Later life impacts of polio can be dreadful even for those who managed a full recovery from their initial disease. It was a horrible, frightening scourge.
clay
@Yarrow: It’s only a “trap” if you LIE, mutha fukka!
Patricia Kayden
Just another friendly reminder that Jeb Bush is still a horrible person.
By the way, when Jeb was Governor of Floriday why didn’t he fix the problems in Broward County?
Aleta
Any recommendations for a good CBD oil (not too expensive), or a good source for ordering ? Are there restrictions on where they can mail it? I decided to try it for the dog, who’s stiff w arthritis and lackluster (he also has a frequent cough/retch, but the vet hasn’t offered any treatment). And for me as well.
eemom
Dump is an antivaxxer. In case anybody forgot.
IIRC in one of the repub primary “debates” he got the two so called “doctors” Paul and Carson to mealy-mouth the so called “issue”.
J R in WV
I’ve been prepping for a trip to NYC for the past few weeks, concert tix, reservations for this and that. Day at the Met Museum of Art, probably a day at Ellis Island. A little packing, have printed out hotel details, flying out of CRW tomorrow morning, via Charlotte to LGA.
Will be with friends coming from CO, going to nightclubs, restaurants, book stores, etc. Stores they don’t have here in the woods…
So won’t be around here very much, hope to be totally distracted from politics and news of all kinds. Wish me luck flying and such!! Keep up the good work everyone!!!
Cermet
@Ohio Mom: The type of mercury (Ethyl) used is utterly harmless; that is why it is used. Even at far higher doses (a few orders of magnitude, even), it is quickly eliminated from the blood stream. Only retained mercury is dangerous and that doesn’t happen with this type of mercury.
MattF
@Yarrow: OOOO. Corsi is a bad one. He was the moving force behind the various swiftboat libels about Kerry.
Schlemazel
My son told me the story of an Afghani father who begged him to cure his son of polio. He knew that nation as rich and powerful as the US could certainly make his boy walk again. That eats at my son. What eats at me is that in the powerful and rich nation we have assholes (my niece for instance) who willingly endanger their children with that horrible disease because of the lies pimped by a convicted criminal and the vapid ‘influencers’ that follow him despite his having been exposed as a fraud. I wish the children well but I do wish the parents would get polio
Ruckus
@ArchTeryx:
Understand I think I get your meaning but. And it’s a massive but, big and firm.
The poor have even more to lose, because everything they do have is precious, to them. I know someone who does work for upper-upper middle class to wealthy people, who will spend $100,000 or more on changing how their yards look. People who have a house in an area where the least expensive house is $5 million. About every 2 to 4 years. They get tired of it and want it changed, throw a hundred or more at it. Poor people can’t do that. Middle class people can’t do that. The vast majority can not do that.
People of wealth don’t value anything the same way most people do. They value things in denominations that you and I can not.
MattF
@J R in WV: Be sure to visit Madame X (in the American Wing)
schrodingers_cat
@eemom: Anti-vaxxer, does not believe in global warming, probably thinks we should go back to gold standard. Its the stupid trifecta that infects the so called “conservatives”.
Mr. Mack
As an avid user of cannabis for many years (though not daily) I used to say that in the event of a serious illness I could fight it with THC, believing it had all the magical powers the true believers claim. Then I got cancer, and my choices were radiation and chemo, or a painful death six months from now. Cannabis and crystals may well work, but I’m embracing science. You never know how you’re going to react to hearing the news….but I immediately agreed to let them infuse me and nuke the hell out of me. Starts tomorrow, wish me luck!
Mnemosyne
BTW, if you needed proof that anti-vaxxers are actively evil, in Minnesota they specifically targeted immigrants from Somalia for their propaganda and most of the kids who had to be hospitalized in 2017’s epidemic were from that community:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/measles-outbreak-fueled-vaccine-fear-sends-kids-hospital-n757141
VeniceRiley
@Mr. Mack: Best of luck, Mr. Mack!
MattF
@Mr. Mack: Good Luck!
JaySinWA
This Trump isn’t afraid of stormy weather!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/12/trumpy-bears-second-coming-sparks-intrigue/?utm_term=.0d7ed79226b5
MomSense
@trollhattan:
My middle son was deathly ill with chicken pox. It was terrifying. He had such high fevers he was hallucinating and the combination of Tylenol and Advil didn’t work. I was up many nights giving him constant sponge baths to try to keep him from seizing. As soon as the vaccine came out I had my youngest vaccinated.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in churches and did the obligatory grave stone rubbings in Sunday School, I saw many graves of young children who died of illnesses we can now prevent. Whenever any parent questions vaccinations I offer to take them on a tour of the children’s graves in the old cemeteries.
I have some friends who are wonderful. They are well educated, liberal, and seemingly normal but they never vaccinated all five of their children. When all five kids got Whooping cough, all of the schools in town were affected. They just have an irrational block about this one issue and I cannot understand why.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
My mom sent me to catch the chicken pox from our next door neighbors, but that was in the pre-varicella vaccine mid-1970s.
Also, I was part of the generation that got an ineffective measles vaccine as a child, so I got to be re-vaccinated with MMR in 1989 when there was a measles outbreak at USC. At least I didn’t catch it!
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I was hoping to see this girl at my 50th HS reunion last year. But she didn’t show. However, there was an in memoriam slide show and she wasn’t in it, so there’s that. This person is one of my life heroes. Some people treated her like shit because she had a hard time walking, wore braces and used crutches. She was smart, had really good grades, IOW she didn’t fit in. Fucking assholes. At our 10 yr reunion, she walked in head held high, proud of her success, at a task that others take for granted. Walking. It was grand. I often wondered if any of my classmates had a clue about what a great human being this girl is.
trollhattan
@MomSense:
A wonderful post.
I enjoy walks through historic cemeteries and it tugs at my heart to see so very many infants’ and children’s graves. We should value what we’ve accomplished in making this relatively uncommon today.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
The whole weird narrative of “my child was stolen from me by autism!” makes me feel really, really sorry for those poor kids who will always be viewed as damaged goods by their families. It’s a very creepy way to view one’s non-neurotypical child.
Yarrow
@MattF: Sure is. Things are happening now, even if they’re not getting big headlines.
sukabi
@Yarrow: so several rightwing twits have gone silent? You know what would be sweet? If the silence was a reaction to indictments they’ve been served for their co-operation with pushing russian propaganda.
A girl can dream.
Miss Bianca
@Mr. Mack: Nuke ’em. *and* get some nice THC edibles as well, because WHY THE HELL NOT (anti-nausea and all). Hope your medical procedures go well!
Yarrow
@sukabi: Yep. Not sure it’s quite that but the timing is interesting.
Skepticat
Played pincushion before leaving the States, and over a few days had vaccines for flu, pneumonia, shingles, and hepatitis (people tend to bleed on first responders) and a booster for diptheria/tetanus/pertussis. Interestingly, in October, I had the second improved shingles shot in New Orleans, as did the two friends I was with, but we had to search for a pharmacy with the vaccine in stock, and apparently we got the last three doses in NOLA. The shingles and pneumonia shots in particular hurt quite a bit, but I found that massaging and icing the injection sites helped a lot.
Ruckus
@Mr. Mack:
Good luck.
It’s a slog, the treatment. It can be worse than a slog but often isn’t. It doesn’t matter, this day and age it can and most often does work very, very well. I speak from first hand experience. It’s a shitty club to be forced into, but at the end of the day, it’s a huge benefit to belong.
Need a bucking up, give a shout.
Hungry Joe
@trollhattan: A few weeks ago I got the first of the two new shingles shots. My arm ached a little for about a week, and that was it. So it varies a lot.
As for generally leaving people the hell alone, here’s Thomas Jefferson (in “Notes on the State of Virginia”): “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
Corsi realizes that a “perjury trap” is not the same as “they caught me committing perjury,” right?
Oh, who am I kidding? Corsi is the kind of guy that, if the cops caught him stealing your car radio, would whine about you setting him up to steal it.
sukabi
@Mr. Mack: good luck, and mary jane is supposed to be good for nausea, pain relief and kicking up the appetite…it may not cure you or prevent cancer, but can ease recovery from being nuked. Speedy recovery wishes your way.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I’ve never been able to figure out this whole, “I won’t get my child vaccinated because I’m so afraid of autism” line. First, because it’s bullshit, and second, even if it wasn’t…we’re talking about life-threatening diseases, here. Are you really saying you’d rather run the risk of your child dying from a communicable disease than run the risk of their getting autism? You’d really rather have A DEAD kid than an autistic one?
Yarrow
@Mnemosyne: Like a robbery trap when someone gets caught robbing the bank.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
Shingles? Yep, a page in my log book. Fun times. Not.
Nasty shit it is, worse than the original chickenpox. Face, jaw, neck, almost to my eye. Doc said, “You have shingles. You poor bastard.” She didn’t normally speak like that. She knew of what she spoke.
Ohio Mom
@Cermet: Yes. I was trying to give the short versions of each scare, and I wasn’t endorsing either “theory”: I was trying to present the two theories as the adherents hold to them. But maybe my tone did not adequately convey that.
I’ve met a few autism parents who have moved on to declaring that the preservative(s) that are substitutes for ethyl-mercury are just as dangerous. They just can’t give up on the idea of vaccines being the cause of their child’s autism.
I firmly believe there are many different autisms, each with its own etiology.
None of them are going to turn out to be caused by vaccines, although perhaps some will be discovered to be triggered by some of the noxious chemicals humans have unleashed upon the environment.
Also, all autism research will be continued to be hampered by lousy record keeping. We keep changing the definition and how we count people with autism.
Yarrow
@Miss Bianca: At some level they don’t think the diseases are a risk. The last generation that really dealt with their kids having those terrible diseases is dying out. Younger parents just don’t understand what the risk is. Autism is real–they see people having it. Crazy diseases that got mostly eradicated decades ago…eh, what’s the big deal? No one we know has those.
Ruckus
@Miss Bianca:
In many cases, yes, yes they are saying that.
Their kids are often an accessary, like the custom rims on the new Mercedes.
JaySinWA
@sukabi: @Yarrow: I wrote on an earlier thread Fox was protesting the treatment of Hannity, apparently I was wrong. It appears to be about Tucker Carlson.
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/fox-news-twitter-tucker-carlson-1203026225/
ETA it is odd that they didn’t put up a tweet or other statement.
Annie
@trollhattan:
Oh good lord. I had chicken pox in 1963 when I was 7, before a vaccine existed for it. The itching was so awful I was scratching in my sleep. My great-grandmother was looking after me and had to sit up with me at night, holding my hands, to stop me from scratching. When she went to sleep she’d put gloves on my hands to minimize the damage.
Why would anyone want to put their kids through that?
J R in WV
@MattF:
Oooh, yeah! Thanks for the tip… everyone, suggestions for things at the Met you want me to see, and my friends from CO… or anywhere in NYC!! I’m also wanting to go to the AM Museum of Natural History, one of my favorite places on earth!!! Those totem poles, those minerals, those ancient bones!! The minerals!!!
I haven’t had a measles vaccination, maybe I should bring that up. I probably had both measles and chicken pox as a kid, long before those vaccines happened.
Mike in NC
I was taught from a very early age: “mind you own business”, but that seems to be an alien concept to most conservatives.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
My point is that the “vaccines cause autism” arguments all depend on the normal laws of cause and effect. You can come up with all kinds of theories about how vaccination might possibly affect kids’ brains, but none of them make sense as an explanation if the autism develops before vaccination. Since we now know that’s the case- we can see signs of autism in newborns- we can discard any theory about vaccines causing autism.
JaySinWA
@Annie: They are growing organic children. Very trendy.
Ohio Mom
@Mr. Mack: Good Luck!
As Adam often reminds us, stay hydrated! I did not have to have chemo but I understand that keeping yourself hydrated is very important in managing the side effects.
All of us here are cheering you on but I hope you are also able to find a support system specific to your type of cancer and your types of treatments. There is information those people will know that we don’t, especially about what to expect and how to best help yourself get through it all.
Please keep us posted.
Steve in the ATL
@Annie: to pwn liberals, of course
J R in WV
@Mr. Mack:
Oh, man… best of luck. They’re so much better now than they were back in the day, and I hear toking up will help you deal with the side-effects of the treatment.
Take care!!
Miss Bianca
@Annie: Because NEEDLES ARE ICKY, but somehow running dangerously high fevers and scratching yourself to ribbons isn’t. Also, mumps – my God, chicken pox and mumps were both so miserable, I can’t imagine wanting to put a child thru’ that.
I’ll never forget an anti-vax parent telling me that I just didn’t know what I was talking about, because I didn’t have kids. At which point, I was able to tell her that I didn’t have kids because my husband had had mumps as a ten-year-old child and had been rendered completely sterile as a result. That was a swell conversation.
Yarrow
@JaySinWA: I’ve seen that. I think it’s a smoke screen. Something’s up.
Ohio Mom
@Mnemosyne: The adult autistics who are active in the self-advocacy movement make this point, and very loudly, that they are not to be mourned, that they are different but not damaged.
Then you have the parents who do view their kids as irretrievably damaged. It’s a chasm in the autism community that I can’t imagine ever being bridged.
JaySinWA
@Yarrow: Could well be, their lack of an explanation would make it a very ineffective protest. Perhaps they lost the password. Or OMG they’ve been shadowbanned! ;=) BTW I didn’t know Drudge had a twitter account. Deleting posts is more of a cover my tracks move than lack of posting
sukabi
@JaySinWA: I don’t really think it’s about Carlson…although Avenatti has a client that is getting ready to sue Carlson and his son? for an assault at a bar.
Mart
And please stop hating on my homeopathic allergy medicine. Allergic to real allergy medicine – shiver, sweat, and cannot pee. Take the homeopathic and allergy symptoms stop – no side effects. Realize probably a placebo as years ago after reading the label my dad said, “My God, according to Avogadro, there is not a single molecule of medicine in this medicine.”
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
I think there are two answers to that:
1) Availability heuristic. They’ve probably encountered kids with autism but not known any who died of the kinds of illnesses we immunize against. Because of that, autism is a lot more real and hence scarier to them than childhood illnesses.
2) Yes, they really would rather have a dead child than an autistic one. Some parents simply aren’t ready to deal with a special needs child. They may think it’s easier to deal with the heartbreak of losing a child than the ongoing hardship of raising one with special needs. It sounds terrible, but I am not in their position and I don’t think I want to judge their thinking on that.
Yarrow
@Mart: You’ll get no argument from me for what works for you. There’s a lot we still don’t understand and maybe at some point we’ll find out that, oh, there was something there that worked. Who knows. If it works for you that’s great.
@JaySinWA: Apparently there’s a Drudge Report account that’s still tweeting but Matt Drudge’s personal account he deleted all his tweets but not his account. Weird. If he thinks that’s going help him somehow he’s dumber than I thought.
@sukabi: Avenatti? He always manages to pop up whenever there’s something going on. Can’t wait for him to go away. He was entertaining for awhile but now…done.
WaterGirl
@Aleta: TaMara has been thrilled with the results from just a week or so of use by Bixby and her kitty. Here’s a link from that thread.
https://balloon-juice.com/2018/11/09/friday-night-open-thread-puppies-make-things-better/#comment-7083560
Mnemosyne
@Mr. Mack:
Good luck! The good news is that cannibis will help get you through the chemo better than a prescribed drug will, so you won’t even have to give up your favorite remedy. ? You may want to have more than one formulation on hand in case it’s impractical to smoke it.
joel hanes
@Gin & Tonic:
the newer more effective shingles vaccine
My excellent internist said:
“Because you’re over 65, we’ll wait on the new vaccine for a couple years until they improve it.”
Roger Moore
@Mart:
This assumes they’re mixing properly. It’s quite possible to mess up a serial dilution in a way that results in the final product being far more concentrated than it ought to be.
MomSense
@Mr. Mack:
Good luck! I’m rooting for you. I highly recommend a cannabis chaser for your chemo if you need help with nausea or appetite.
@J R in WV:
I love the museum of natural history. Spring for the additional ticket for the planetarium. The whole experience was wonderful. Even the music they commissioned for the presentation was spectacular.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom:
For the parents who will die caring for their children, who never were able to communicate or be independent in any way….I don’t think seeing that child as damaged is unreasonable.
That’s not to say that the anti-vaccine position is acceptable, of course. But having a severely autistic child is unbelievably hard, and a life-limiting burden.
Ohio Mom
@J R in WV: You can get a blood test to see if you already have antibodies for measles and chicken pox. I had one, and found out that the old family story* about me never having had the mumps was true, so I got the MMR vaccine.
*The story was that my parents planned to take us to the just-opened Disney in Florida for winter break. My brother and sister had just finished with mumps and it looked like I would be in the midst of them during the proposed trip, so we stayed home. As you can imagine, my siblings never let me forget the time I denied them a trip to Disney.
Mnemosyne
@Ohio Mom:
I remember getting into a weird argument with someone here one time over the definition of autism. Apparently there are some mitochondrial disorders that can be triggered by a high fever (like one a kid has as a reaction to a vaccine) whose symptoms are the same as autism, and this person (can’t remember who) insisted that everyone with the same symptoms should be lumped into the same category because Reasons. That … didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Finding out that my niece and nephew were on the spectrum was the least surprising news ever, because I’d met my sister-in-law’s family. Very nice people, but several generations of them very clearly on the spectrum.
Seanly
I’ve been on both ends of the anti-vaxx movement (sort of). I was vaccinated as a child and actually had to get a bunch of extra boosters when I went to college due to poor records.
My stepmother read some book in the early 80’s by some quack doctor. His premise was that cancer rates had increased when mass vaccinations started (or that was the only part I could get through). I was a teenager and long vaccinated, but my step-siblings where no longer vaccinated. Since you had to be vaccinated to go to public schools, my crazy stepmom then homeschooled the brood.
I’ve since read that this guy’s entire premise was wrong – cancer rates have actually been pretty steady, but what we see is more historically rarer cancers due to longer lifespans and more environmental factors (any people educated on this can correct me please). So when the whole autism thing came around 10 years later I was already armed against that BS.
I am now on the other end* as my wife was immuno-compromised for a couple of years due to her blood stem cell transplant. While her immune system works well now, being protected by the herd does a lot better. She might still need to get some of the basic immunizations done when she goes back to Vandy for her annual checkup. Yeah, she still needs to do MMR.
* I’ve always been pro-vaxx, just not militant about it.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
So is having a child who is born with severe cerebral palsy, or spina bifida, or any number of severe disorders. Caring for a severely disabled child is incredibly stressful and expensive and some people break from the stress.
The reason anti-vaxxers are evil is that they simultaneously blame the parents of children on the severe end of the autism spectrum and give them false hope: Your child’s disability is your own fault for letting them be vaccinated, but you can save other parents from experiencing the same pain by telling people not to vaccinate their kids. They’re encouraging those despairing parents to actually do MORE harm in the world rather than giving them the support they need.
Roger Moore
@Seanly:
This sounds about right. It’s one of those things you have to realize; life is 100% fatal. Nobody gets out of it alive. If you eliminate a major cause of mortality, like common communicable diseases, some other cause of mortality has to step in and replace it. If people aren’t dying when they’re young, diseases of old age will inherently tend to become more prevalent.
It’s also interesting to look at historical causes of death to see what was killing people hundreds of years ago. I have a very interesting book called “The Death of Kings“, which is about the medical history of the monarchs of England. It’s interesting to hear what people back then died of. Cancer was a surprisingly common cause of death in the English royal family.
sm*t cl*de
@Ohio Mom:
Most of the loons have moved on to blaming the aluminium-salt adjuvant used in many vaccines (to get the same immune response from a smaller dose of antigen).
Ohio Mom
@Mnemosyne: Many developmental disorders, not just Mitochondrial disorders, can present with symptoms that resemble autism. The same education strategies (e.g., behaviorism)
and therapeutic inventions (speech, OT, etc.) that are useful for autistic kids generally also tend to benefit kids with these other disorders. But that is as far as “lumping” everyone together is useful.
I am of two minds about the revised definition of autism in the new DSM, which combines Autism, Aspergers, PDD-NOS and Childhood Disintergrative Disorder into one category titled Autism. I think it is going to make it harder to tease out the different types of autism and also the conditions that look like autism, like Mitochondrial disorders.
@Suzanne: I am not without sympathy for parents of very autistic childre, and I know some. What would make all of their lives easier would be if we had a robust social support system. They shouldn’t have to shoulder all the work by themselves and they should have the comfort of knowing their adult children will be safe, cared for and happy when they age out of their parents’ homes. But this is the good old USA, we don’t do socialistic things like that.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: I agree with you. I said that.
But people are never going to be as rational as you want them to be about their kids’ lives and their own lives. Their feelings of grief about their kids being damaged are not crazy. Expecting parents who will never see their children be independent, who will never again live lives not caring for someone else day in and day out…..to not feel badly about that and to be able to accept it as just part of the human tapestry……I don’t think that recognizes how devastating that is. And I also think it is counter-productive, because those parents will not listen to anyone when they don’t feel that their struggles are recognized.
When people are suffering, they reach for anything that will alleviate that.
Dan B
My brother and I got measles, mumps, chicken pox, Hong Kong flu (the worst – fever delirium), but not polio. Other kids did so they were in wheelchairs and braces, and limped painfully. One classmate recovered with months of excruciating therapy and got muscly by sixth grade – ripped! Exercise didn’t bother him after the intense PT. No one wanted to wrestle him in PE. I lasted half a nano second. List his legs in Vietnam. That was too much bad luck in my book and his. Won the Biston Marathon but still struggled with bitterness.
Eveyone in our tiwn got the polio vaccines and everything else. We saw all the diseases or experienced them all. There were lots of adults who’d lived through the Spanish flu, like my father.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@J R in WV: Reminds me of one vet who said the Japanese tried bio warfare experiments on him and it never worked because of all the vaccines the Army doctors pumped into him.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom:
Well, yeah. But that requires recognizing that all lives have value, and we all know that only white fetuses have value.
Jay
@Yarrow:
After Thiel bankrupted Gawker, there’s not a lot of Lawyer’s that will take on clients against wealthy RWNJ’s like Tucker.
Avenatti will.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
And sometimes what they reach for only makes their situation worse. Is it okay for parents of severely disabled children to become drug addicts, because that’s their way of coping with their grief and we shouldn’t judge them?
There are healthy and unhealthy ways of coping with grief. We should not be encouraging people to seek out unhealthy ways of coping that will only harm themselves and others. To me, letting grieving anti-vaxxers continue to facilitate the death and injury of other people’s children is like giving them a free pass to drive drunk because everyone grieves differently and we can’t judge what they choose to do.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
One might assume that the rather close inbreeding might just have some responsibility. A tad maybe.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
The English royal family was never especially badly inbred. Sure, they occasionally married first cousins, but they also had a tendency to marry more distant relatives often enough to keep from really serious inbreeding. The most famous example of a genetic disease in the British royal family (Victoria being a carrier of hemophilia) was an X-linked disorder, which is not a result of inbreeding. The really bad inbreeding was in the Hapsburgs.
Ken
@Roger Moore:
I suppose a homeopathic dilution having a single molecule of the original substance would technically be infinitely more concentrated than it should be. IIRC there was a case a couple of years ago where a homeopathic vendor was careful to prevent that, by using none of the original substance and just filling the bottles directly from the tap.
raven
@Aleta: Ellevet:
There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence supporting hemp as an effective treatment in both the animal and human sphere, but we wanted hard evidence about why it works, if it works and how it works. This led us to partner in a clinical trial with veterinarians at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. The results of that study earned the overwhelming enthusiasm of the vets and the study’s dog owners. Seeing people moved to tears by their dogs’ return to more happy and active lives confirmed our belief that we can help pets live their best lives.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
I work as an analytical chemist, so this stuff is where I live. Analytical chemists are as superstitious about following the exact same procedure every time, even when it’s not obvious how it could affect the outcome, as baseball players. The pitfalls with serial dilutions are a good example of why. It’s tempting to make a serial dilution in a volumetric flask, which is designed for diluting things precisely. It even has a long, skinny neck so you can add liquid just up to the line and get exactly the right volume.
But when you do that, you have to be careful to follow the correct procedure. The right way to do it is to add the solution you’re diluting to the flask, then add more solvent until it gets close to the line, and finally add the solvent very slowly to get it right to the line. Then you have to mix very thoroughly, including inverting the flask many times, to get it to mix thoroughly. If instead you start by filling the flask most of the way with solvent, add the solution being diluted, and then top up to the line with solvent, the concentrated solution will all be in the neck of the flask. No matter how many times you invert the flask, it won’t dilute much. If you then sample from the neck, you’ll get back a solution that’s barely been diluted instead of having been diluted 100x or 1000x as you expect.
And, of course, doing a serial dilution makes this worse. If you expect to get a 1000x dilution but actually get 10x, after 3 steps you’ll be reduced by only a thousand fold instead of a billion fold. So when you think your solution has gotten down to a single molecule in a liter of water, you may still have enough to have a meaningful effect. And homeopaths have been caught making this general kind of mistake.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne:
For Christ’s sake, of course it isn’t okay.
But if you want to actually be able to communicate in a meaningful way with these people, which you do, as you want them to change their thinking, you need to be able to empathize with them. Telling people that they are wrong is effective approximately 0% of the time.
Aleta
@WaterGirl: @raven: Thanks, that’s very helpful. Yes, I’d missed that info from Tamara.
lofgren
I’ve heard of nurses putting “therapeutic touch” or other BS on insurance forms, because just spending time with patients and listening to them and talking to them is scientifically proven to be really good for sick people, but you can’t bill for “spent some time chatting with patient Hausmann about his two poodles and their favorite tug rope” and if you can’t bill for it then the hospital considers them to be wasting time.
Interrobang
There’s currently a measles outbreak in New York among the Hasidic communities there. One of the major rabbis there is a POS antivax loon. Another rabbi put out a directive saying that, in the context of Jewish civil-religious law, vaccine refusal is equivalent to murder. Maybe that’ll help.
I’m with Mnemosyne — I got the possibly-defective measles vax too, and had to be re-vaccinated just a couple of years ago. I wound up coming down with bronchitis a couple days later, but I think that was just coincidence. A really nasty coincidence.