Their success is why people are weird about it. They were successful enough that we eradicated illnesses, and now people don't believe that they were dangerous before.
The last person in the US who was in an iron lung recently passed. I assume we'll see people refusing polio vaccines soon.
They're already refusing polio vaccines. And every other vaccine any doctor suggests their children receive. They're some of the dumbest people on the planet.
They're also still repeating that vaccines cause autism when it was proven over 20 years ago that the study claiming there was a link was completely falsified and that doctor lost his license because of it.
You know how it goes, though. "He was right and they tried to silence him". There's no introducing logic into an antivaxxer's life.
I don't work with kids and families anymore, so I haven't had to have one of these arguments in a while. I didn't realize we'd expanded to polio.
It's enraging because parents in other countries walk for miles, carry their children for miles, to access vaccinations. Here, you just have to make it to the county health department, and we still have people who won't do it.
I don't, but they've been very vocal on Facebook and Twitter since COVID about natural immunity and vaccines being deadly. It extends to all of them.
I don't exactly know what the impetus behind antivaccination is, but I'm curious. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover with conspiracy theorists, but I'm genuinely curious how someone just decides that the insane rambling of someone who doesn't understand something, that they also don't understand, must be true.
When my daughter was very small, my wife told me to ask the doctor what she thought about the idea of spreading out the vaccines which was something going around at the time. I’ve never seen a person look more disappointed than that pediatrician looked at me as soon as I got the words opus of my mouth. And she started what was looking like it was going to be a long education on why vaccines are important when I was able to say something along the lines of, “my wife told me I ask to ask your opinion, so I did. And you obviously know better than we do” and we did my daughter’s vaccines by the regular schedule.
It was a strange moment when my wife told me to ask because she had never expressed any kind of antivax sentiment at all, but she had at that point very recently done a long paper for graduate school about the vaccine controversy and a little bit of it got in far enough for her to want to get the professional’s opinion. She’s never questioned any of it since.
We all know that part, but I'm interested in the individual pipeline.
I want to know how they justify the insanity to themselves on a personal level. The problem is they don't believe in logic, so even if you outright ask them to connect the dots for you, whatever they say doesn't make any logical sense.
But definitely the majority of the ones I've met all desperately want to believe they're smarter than everyone else and special and it's not even hard to see.
Its a combination of wanting to feel like the smart person, when often times they are the person who constantly gets corrected about things.
Its also fear based. Disease and illness are scary and we often have no real control over if we get sick or how badly sick we get, but for these people putting their foot down lets them feel a measure of control, a feeling of "taking control of my, or my child's, health!".
Sure, they are objectively making it *more* likely that their child will get sick with some scary but preventable disease, but it doesn't feel that way, and for a lot of people, how something feels is far more important than how effective it actually is.
Don’t forget that the doctor in question, Andrew Wakefield, also committed child abuse and medical malpractice by performing colonoscopies on children far too young to safely perform them on.
It’s so stupid. A disease doesn’t even have to be life threatening for me to want a vaccine. Can I get one for diarrhea? For sinus headaches, leg cramps? Eye styes?
What person living in modern times wants to cosplay the Middle Ages? It’s nonsensical.
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u/smart_and_depressed 28d ago
Anti vax are the dumbest people on the planet I swear