https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/childhood-vaccination-rates-are-declining-you-can-blame-maga/
Not Covid vaccines—the old ones that protect us from measles, whooping cough, and polio.
Conservatism is a pre-existing condition/risk factor to your (and those around you) health
No, he is not. He initially tried to run as a Dem, but once Dems realized he was a right-wing nut job, he (appropriately) decided to run as an Independent.
No worries. The Kennedys have always been a bit nuts. They were Dems in the 1960's-1980's, but began to spread out after that.
They were never qualified to be public representatives. They were just celebrity millionaires who decided to get into politics.
Dunno that I'd go that far. RFK was arguably the best attorney general we've had and had many highly progressive beliefs that he put into practice, including tackling poverty and homelessness by investing in communities. The guy was a brilliant attorney and even his work with the Senate Labor Rackets Committee was arguably more rooted in getting rid of the mob influence of guys like Hoffa.
I don't love everything he did but he was undoubtedly qualified to be in office and would have been a much better president than Nixon.
...would have been a much better president than Nixon.
Well, to be fair, a stale slice of raisin bread would have been significantly less harmful than Nixon. Even his "good deeds" were strategically designed to benefit only corporations and people in power.
It really is rather astonishing what one idiot in the right place at the right time can accomplish. For example, if you had asked me to describe a typical anti-vaxxer anytime before 2020 I would have described someone a lot like a hippie. Someone who smokes a lot of weed, makes their own clothes, shows up at all the mid-week protests against factory farming, that sort of thing. If you asked me that same question now you'd get a very different answer and it really can be summed pretty succinctly in the acronym MAGA.
I'm sure the first type is still out there but the second type is much more interesting in the academic sense of the word. These are people who were openly mocking anti-vaxxers less than 5 years ago. These are the people who didn't think twice about mandatory vaccination days in school or the military. This sort of person flipped their whole attitude towards the medical community almost exclusively because one loud idiot who obviously doesn't have a fucking clue how any of it works told them that he knew better. That's amazing.
Can’t tell you how many times in my clinic I heard “I can’t stand that Fauci”. Every time a look of disgust would envelop my face and I would ask ”why?!” in disbelief. Most of the time they couldn’t tell my why other times because he “lied”. It was clear they didn’t understand basic science and we’re being told what to believe. These were your run of the mill MAGAs that constitute the majority and the norm where I’m from.
What's wild has been watching previous hippies that were antivaxxers suddenly adopt racist and hateful attitudes because it aligned with their newfound perceived in-group.
Like - how do you go from proudly having protested for civil rights to using the N word all because of the strength of your convictions about the healing power of quartz?
Our brains are weird as shit and I really can't wait for AI superintelligence because it's become clear as fucking day that such a thing as superintelligence sure as hell isn't going to be happening in humans.
Our 13 month old is fully vaccinated. We do this crazy thing where we trust our doctor. He's doing great and we're doing our part...it is so frustrating how stupid Republicans are
The craziest part to me is the docs who believe the conspiracies. You spent all that time studying medicine and don’t believe it?
My "favorite" moment like this was when I was doing IT for a surgery center and one of the surgeons walked by in a "this mask does nothing" mask.
Like, how the fuck are you so pilled that your dumb ass ignores a critical part of the PPE you wear literally every day?
Conspiracy can slander a lot of things. It used to be easy to slander anti-opiate pushing doctors "conspiracy theorists".
I'm implying that someone can question a "consensus" without being crazy, and can question evidence without being anti-vax. Look at Paul Offit on the more moderate end, or Vinay Prasad on the more extreme end.
Relatively safe. They can still cause harm. That's why the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme is a thing, at least in the UK.
What I said was two very pro-vaccine vaccine researchers who were called conspiracy theorists for saying there may be some costs to mandating vaccination.
Any and every intervention has a cost, even if its just the cost of paying someone to administer and produce it.
We had one of our cats in the vet a while back and she noted that he needed his rabies vaccine, and we could tell she was a little nervous about how we would respond. We said, "Do it!", but apparently she's had a few people respond negatively...
Declining your pet's rabies vaccine?
As in, your pet could contract rabies, bite or scratch you, and then you don't get the shot in time due to either denial, or you're too ignorant to see the symptoms of rabies in your pet, or they are displaying the more subtle symptoms and you don't catch it?
Even if you do catch it and treat yourself, now Fluffy has a fatal illness and has to die.
What an astoundedly stupid decision.
It's a combination of things and to just simply blame MAGA is doing a disservice. Before we had MAGA we had antivax on the rise. We did after all have Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy.
But more importantly what fuels a lot of this is ignorance. Some willful, some that cannot be helped, and some just not an easy thing for one to wrap one's head around. That ignorance fuels fear, uncertainty, and doubt something that's sometimes referred to as FUD. And that can manifest into all kinds of things, chief among them is outrage which MAGA acolytes feed into for political gain. Because that's how the MAGA crew keeps fuel in it's tank, feeding into outrage.
And for a moment, I'd ask everyone to take a look around. Look at the world we are in. Plenty to be outraged about, right? But while you might find specific things to be outraged about, the MAGA crowd keeps it unfocused. What's woke? It's whatever it needs to be for the time and place. Who is in the Soros Cabal? Whoever needs to be for the particular discussion at the moment.
But it's important to remember that the MAGA crowd feeds into something that can be traced even further back. There's an ongoing dogma about vaccines that's roughly the equal to the myth of the Inuit having 400 words for snow. Note, the Inuit DO NOT have 400 words for snow. But like anything, once something gets started, it becomes really hard to shake. The dogma of antivaxxers relies on three components:
These things sow a level of distrust and when paired with the rapacious nature that is the American healthcare system, there is massive amounts of gasoline being poured by folks who are interested in profits, that contrarians, shysters, and grifters are more than happy to ignite to further their agenda. We didn't just get here by ignorance, we got here by a bunch of folks who would use that ignorance for their own gains. Like Andrew Wakefield, so many antivaxers I know indicate his research while casually omitting that he had published that paper in order to enact an elaborate fraud. The idea was to get people to select his "safe" version of the MMR vaccines that would have made him a ton of profit. Nor do people speak about Brian Deer who did the investigative research and reporting that eventually undid, at least in a legal sense and brought about his removal as a licensed doctor, Andrew Wakefield's report. No what most people remember is that Wakefield published a report and there's been this sorting of those who bought into it and those who didn't. And all of that was on the background of Autism, a disease that initially no one had any idea existed which feeds into that whole FUD.
The MAGA crowd has made it political. Lots of people are wondering about that "medical record" and why tax payer money can only be unlocked by the public on condition that they take a shot. That latter part was predicated on the notion that everyone at one point knew that they did NOT want to catch any disease that the MMR shot protected against. And if you've ever talked to any "sovereign citizen" type, you can just take that mentality and extend it to say "roads". Why predicate having a license on the ability to use a road one paid for? Why pay for it? Why think taxes are legal? It's road for sure, but there's lot of similarities along the way.
There's a level of contempt for our Government. I mean just look around, one wouldn't be hard pressed to find a clear example. There's been a lot of failure globally in Democratic order because quite a few are more interested in profit to be made than benefit to society. The thing with the antivaxxers is they've taken that contempt and made choices and commitments that are dangerous for themselves, their children, and their locality. They've allow that contempt to be woven into an identity and there are all kinds of agents out there that will validate that identity in exchange for profit or power. But we should remember that if we are going to simplify it, those are the true drivers.
For anyone like me who’s curious what the 0/00 symbol means, it’s per mille, or per thousand. So 0.12 0/00 is the equivalent of 12/100k.
How about the right-wing media which fostered scientific ignorance because making money and supporting a fascist political party was more important to them than the good of the country? These MAGA dipshits didn't stop getting vaccinated until they were told to.
How about Christianity which advocated for blind faith and dismissed knowledge as worthless since the first century?
Where do you think the right wing got the idea that listening to authoritarian guidance and conforming to group beliefs trumps scientific knowledge and learning?
In general, it's alarming how often some form of 'spiritualism' whether Christian or some Western strain of Eastern branded BS goes hand in hand with people saying they don't believe in vaccines.
This isn't simply scientific illiteracy, it's spiritual literacy as a competing factor encouraging belief in magical thinking over observation and testing.
Which at this point has expanded out to weird crap like thinking the pyramids were built by aliens or that Jesus was secretly talking about tongue yoga to stimulate the pituitary gland to all sorts of the most bizarre shit I've ever heard.
People have thrown away any grip on reality and along with it suddenly become insufferable know-it-not-at-alls that just don't shut up about criticizing actual knowledge while promoting insanity.
Which came first? The political party or the childhood lead poisoning?
Let's not focus too much on labels.. the real issue is there's like 80 million dumb motherfuckers out there who plan on voting. You can't cure stupid and we're in fuckin trouble!
Lead poisoning, it used to be popular for plates and cups cuz it made the food taste better (because the lead leached in and lead has a sweet taste), then later indoor plumbing (sometimes with lead pipes) became common like a decade prior to the founding of the Republican party in the 1850s. We didn't get leaded gas until the 1920s
Anyone considered getting rid of leaded avgas yet?
Or testing food for lead more stringently?
Like they had children suffering from lead toxicity recently from contaminated applesauce packages and it takes a fuckton of lead to cause toxicity.
Maybe we need to find a way to trick all of their churches into showing them Old Yeller.
Between this, forcing women to give birth against their will, and celebrating stealing children from migrant parents, making children suffer seems to be a core Republican value.
No but you see they have to make life shitty for people. Otherwise, what could they blame the Democrats for?
Are all of these kids homeschooled? We just put our daughter in online school and even they want her immunization records. I don't even get that, but fine, we'll send them. She's up to date on her vaccines.
They just want to make sure there kids don't give them virus over the internet because the school beard heard that you can get virus on the internet.
You know how scary the internet can be... I once read an article written by someone with the flu, and then I got the flu!
Same with my son. I am guessing not all states or counties have such restrictions. Especially in remote areas.
Absolutely. They are teying to destroy everything and anything progressive by calling it fake or woke, or snowflake, or any other fad trendy word they think their base will react to.
Someone told me they were like a Reverse Cargo Cult, didn't make sense until they explained it.
So if you don't know, a Cargo Cult is a phenomenon in which uncontacted nations have planes crash there, or they notice planes.
They'll try to recreate planes, radios, etc., and when they don't work, they pray to the Gods to try to make them work.. Believing they just need the right blessings. This is an oversimplification, but it's a very real phenomenon. Heck there's a tribe somewhere that literally believes King Charles to be God because they had photos of him.
MAGA people have the reverse situation. They know why the planes work, they can see them working, and yet strangely... They build their own anyway, using bad intentions and duct tape, and when it doesn't work, they go.. "See it's impossible, why does theirs works? It doesn't, it's a hoax, they're lying to you because they want to enslave you!"
Only here it's not a plane, it's science in general and the concept of basic human empathy.
Blame Andrew Wakefield. He was the one who convinced Jenny McCarthy. She's a useful idiot. And I do mean idiot. She wrote an article that's been scrubbed from the internet about how her child was an 'indigo,' meaning he would have superhuman powers. This was before his autism diagnosis, which apparently changed her mind, because that's when the article got scrubbed.
It also contained a sentence that said (paraphrased): "After my son was born, I quit smoking."
She's a fucking idiot.
I thought you were kidding, but nope. The smoking sentence isn't mentioned in there, but everything else is. Wow.
Well, they're just quoting parts of what she wrote, so it might have been elsewhere. I didn't mean to imply that you were making that up.
No, you didn't imply that. I'm just surprised they didn't quote it and you'd think they would have.
Well, if they are that determined to go extinct - let them. Although I feel sorry for the kids that get mistreated this way by their parents.
Well no one can do anything against a genocide that is self directed.
Like if everyone in Spain decided to commit suicide I wouldn't think it to be ok, but it's their choose and more space.for the Portuguese to expand to sooo. Well let them