Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican congresswoman and a staunch ally of Trump, suggested a return to “measles parties” for children. She criticized contemporary attitudes towards vaccination, stating, “Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.”
I spent SO MUCH TIME during my pediatrics clinical rotation explaining vaccines to new parents. In some cases, I sat there for a literal hour and debunked myths and conspiracy theories in order to get the parents to consider maybe doing a delayed vaccination schedule. I’m a medical student, so my time is basically worthless and I viewed this as a good use of it, but it was so incredibly frustrating to have to do over and over.
For other folks who know anti-vax parents (new or not), here’s the best line of argument I came up with:
Vaccines have been around for a very long time now, and the only changes we’ve made to them recently is to make them better and safer. The preservatives in them like the mercury compound are perfectly safe, but we’ve still worked hard to improve the manufacturing process to minimize the need for those preservatives and make the vaccines as pure as possible.
Vaccines are made of little fragments of the virus or bacteria, or a modified, significantly weaker version of the pathogen to give your child’s immune system a chance to see it before the real thing shows up. It’s like giving your child’s immune system a wanted poster or a punching bag to practice on because it has to make special tools to fight each different pathogen.
The reason we load kids up with so many vaccines in the first year or two of life is because their immune systems are still growing and it’s an optimal time to introduce things for it to prepare for, and we want to give them some protection of their own before the antibodies from mom run out around 6 to 12 months of life.
We have decades of data showing that vaccines are safe and effective, and the complications and side effects are so minor compared to the problems that can come from the disease. And it’s usually around 1000:1 ratio of complications from the disease versus complications from the vaccine, and the vaccine complications are almost always less severe than the complications from the disease.
If you refuse vaccination for your child for reasons besides an anaphylactic allergy to the ingredients, you are gambling your child’s life with most of these diseases, and it would have been an entirely preventable death. Vaccines are very hard to make and we have prioritized making vaccines for the diseases that kill children. We don’t bother making vaccines for things that are just a nuisance, so the vaccines we have exist for very good reasons. For the most famous example, measles has about 5 different ways it can kill your child that are impossible to treat or prevent once they have it, and many ways to cause permanent damage. The known and most common side effects of the measles vaccine are pretty mild and can be easily treated with medications we have available.
Edit: Fuck it. I’ve decided that I’m going to use some of my copious (/s) free time writing a children’s and parents’ book about vaccine safety with this argument. I will self publish if I have to and give it out in family medicine and pediatric clinics if it kills me.
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The problem with that is that there are already too many children in need of good homes and some of these parents are very good in every other respect. The people who push anti-vax stuff need to be made into public examples, but the rank-and-file believers are usually just well-meaning dupes.
My explanation is simpler: “The body learns how to fight diseases by eating killed viruses. A vaccine gives you dead viruses, so your body can learn without having to get hurt first. A measles party uses living viruses, so your kid might suffer death or worse.”
Then show them the results.
Probably not accurate in detail, but hopefully good enough. If not, then the brevity will let you move onto someone who hasn’t abandoned their brain.
They see that rash as not that scary, and the rash is honestly the mildest part of the disease. Measles can cause encephalitis (brain swelling) and kill the child, it can cause pneumonia and kill the child, they can recover from the illness and be completely fine for a few years until the virus reactivates and their entire central nervous system becomes intractably inflamed and they seize until they die. And there’s nothing we can do about any of those complications besides things like IV fluids or ventilatory support because there are no antiviral medications effective against measles, so we just have to hope the child’s immune system wins.
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The sad thing about debunking is that you need to have direct contact with the person under a delusion to build rapport and need to be quite knowledgeable about the topic, but planting the the delusion can be done at a large scale by any eloquent doofus with time to spare. It’s so frustrating.
It’s definitely a starfish situation. You won’t be able to save all of them, but you can make a difference to each individual that you help. It’s my guiding principle in medicine for everything from preventative care to resuscitation. I can’t save every patient, but I can do my best to help the one in front of me, and previous failures do not prevent future successes.
It is always harder to build than to destroy.
Counterpoint: putting two flat Lego pieces together.
Just adding this for completion : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
500,000 people a year used to die from polio every year. Death. Death is the side affects of not getting vaccinated.
Another worth noting is if an antivaxxer says “we don’t know what they put into vaccines”, respond with “we don’t know what they put in painkillers and yet you take them no problem”. Nine times out of ten, these antivaxxers would take painkillers willy nilly without question. Saying this makes them question their line of thought. Heck, the same could be said just about anything. We don’t know what cooks in restaurants put into the food we ordered, and yet there is no significant movement advocating to stop ordering takeaways or eating outside of home.
…except that we do know what gets put in every medication. Every ingredient has to be registered and tested, and if they change the formulation at all, they have to test it again to make sure it’s safe.
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We had our cats in for their annual checkups a few years back, and the vet noted they were due for their vaccinations. The way she said it, we could hear she was bracing for an argument. I wonder if someone had laid into her about it earlier that day.
We, of course, had the vaccinations done, much to her relief.
Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids
They should have their skulls kicked in before even thinking of having children
Lack of sex ed and no access to family planning services creates a whole bunch of idiots breeding more idiots
Thanks, conservative Christians, for decades of public instruction in abstinence only, for cultural supremacy of purity culture (I’m thinking specifically of the early 90s/00s where churches were all teaching the same curriculum and so many of the hottest celebrities all said they were waiting for marriage).
Knowing nothing about how relationships should work, how to navigate emotional problems effectively, or what red flags to look out for has sure made relationships and communities stronger, all across the country.
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She needs to be censored and imprisoned.
When did we start rewarding politicians for being angry and stupid?
Since 1994. When Newt Gingrich first slithered onto the scene to start spreading lies and dumb bullshit. Prior to that it was just lies.
gingrich was also the ones that started the thing with the senate to not work with the senate unless they caved into your demands, MITCH just ran with it and amplified it.
Just had a thought. What if we took a insignificant amount of the virus and injected it into people. This would allow them to develop antibodies so that if they do become exposed they are ready to fight it.
Probably safer then just exposing people to the virus. Could also do it to enough people that it virtually eradicates the virus.
Just an idea. We would also have to do a bunch of testing and have a bunch of regulations around it. Just to prove there isn’t any unwarranted side effects.
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. What a timeline to be in right now.
If something like that worked, scientists would have done it by now.
Youre right. Sorry. I’m so dumb.
I have a better idea. What if we take the genetic code of the virus, inject it into people and have their own bodies produce many more virus particles so they get a stronger and more targeted immune response? Who knows, someone could win an important prize for that.
I read this comment and became autistic. Becareful people science makes you spicy.
Ben Franklin was anti-vax, but came around. Also these fuckwits are so dumb that they don’t know vaccines have been around throughout when America was “great” and way beyond.
In his defense, in 1721 vaccines were really a new unproven technology. And if you don’t know it works, or even what causes diseases in the first place, it’s reasonable to be skeptical. It’s also reasonable to change your mind when you see it does really work.
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And, without the context we have today, I could see how it might be kinda counter-intuitive.
This sounds like witchcraft. J/K
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That comment clearly is a joke that references that
Taking medical advice from MTG? 💀💀💀
Letting her run your country? 😥😥😥
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I was a kid when they were first developing the vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella (we called it German measles). So my brothers and I all got every one of them. I remember being sick with them, and with one of the measles types (don’t remember which) I was so sick I though I was gonna die. I’ll never forget lying there, even thinking of certain things made me puke (or dry heave) so I had to concentrate on not thinking of anything. I remember puking so hard it came out my nose. One of my brothers was so sick, his fever was so high, they took him to the hospital.
Do parents really want to put their children through this instead of a shot? WTF
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I assume it’s more about the parents high-fiving each other over really sticking it to the man or something. It’s just one of the results of rampant anti-intellectualism. The kids are just a random collateral in that circlejerk of those brake pads of evolution.
I don’t think it’s that. I think they’ve been brainwashed by anit-vax propaganda into truly being afraid of vaccines, combined with not understanding how severe these diseases are and how serious the consequences of not vaccinating can be.
We need to make it a priority to teach critical thinking skills in schools.
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should be child abuse
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The future seems not that bad now that I know we won’t be seeing an entire generation of Republicans
We’ve been thinking that for three generations and somehow they’re still here
They are children! They are victims here.
Edit: the fact this got downvoted, the fact there are people who will gladly punish children for the actions of their parents, what a hellish world we live in.
Those kids are doomed anyway.
“Those kids” go to school with my kids, and my wife is allergic to the measles vaccination. Which means she is susceptible to it.
Please try to care.
I care about that. But what else can we do? I am just trying to find a silver lining in all this because I am going to lose people to. But at least the Republicans go extinct
So arrest and jail her
In a regular reality someone as willfully ignorant as that slag would have Darwined themselves out of existence
Stupid bitch.
I propose a herpes and SARS party for her.
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better to start kissing everyone with cold sores, and give everyone mono, or CMV, and chickenpox at the same time, since all of those are herpes viruses. they can try herpes B virus(but this comes from a wild animals.
“Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.”
It’s pretty normal to demonize parents who abuse children.
You can’t cure stupidity…
It’s gonna take MORE than all my kids DYING for me to LEAVE the Republican Party!
