Stupid/ignorant people should not be allowed to make these kinds of decisions that affect entire populations.
Wakefield should be rotting in jail for the rest of this life. He made up the autism link because he wanted to get filthy rich and his actions have killed and maimed untold lives.
A person will get seriously sick if they don’t have enough salt and water in their bodies.
So we should help him out, and drop him in the middle of the Pacific.
Only barely related, but this is a delight:
(Note: this is a comedy bit)
Can confirm, turmeric tastes like a fart.
Those thinking they are making a good health choice for their kids in choosing to not vaccinate need to listen to the voice of experience.
I loved reading that one idiot from Fox saying “Every babyboomer alive caught measles, and we’re fine!”
No shit dumbass, that’s because the ones who weren’t fine DIED FROM MEASLES.
Somewhere along the line, dumb people got the idea that measles is some unpleasant but mostly friendly rite of passage-type disease…like chickenpox, which almost everyone got and almost nobody died from.
Measles ain’t friendly.
Well it’s nowhere as bad a Measles and many of the other diseases, but Chickepox killed people every year and put thousands in the hospital. It can certainly be a very serious and lethal disease. I only mention this because we really don’t want people avoiding that vaccine either, and calling it a right of passage.
I had Chickenpox as an adult. At the time, if somebody had offered to me put out of my misery, I’d probably have accepted.
Yeah, the mortality rate for measles isn’t that high, but since it’s so infectious, it results in a non trivial number of deaths.
I believe that just prior to the introduction of the MMR vaccine, measles killed 500 people every year in the US.
Proposal: send anti-vaxxers to Oklahoma with a complimentary gift of Freedom Blankets.
I’m at least 20% joking.
I had it as a kid, unpleasant but fine. My mother got it - somehow, for a second time - as an adult and it was an awful experience, far worse than anything I had.
If they figure measles is fine and is a rite of passage, why don’t they just infect all their kids with measles?
I’m going to guess that you thought you were joking.
Ya, back when I was a kid, before the chickenpox vaccine, some parents intentionally exposed their kids to chickenpox.
The theory wasn’t bad… since chickenpox is the same virus as shingles, folks thought that catching it as a child prevented shingles as an adult, and since shingles is so much worse, it seemed smart.
Unfortunately, exposure as a child doesn’t immunize you against shingles. Turns out the virus just goes dormant near your nerves, and at some point when you are older, may activate itself. So, being exposed to chickenpox as a child actually increases your chances of contracting shingles as an adult (since it’s less likely you will be exposed to chickenpox as an adult these days, since folks are vaccinated against it now).
So, back in the day, those parents were actually trying to vaccinate their kids against shingles… now, it’s done by anti-vaxxers who think that it’s some kind of “natural vaccination” process, because they are dumb and afraid of actual vaccines.
Chickenpox is also fairly horrible as an adult compared to as a child, so part of the theory was to get it early when it wasn’t as bad.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s crazy. As a child chickenpox is a nuisance. It’s just awful as an adult, and can be a genuinely serious illness.
There might also be some mixup with the discovery of the smallpox vaccine from the immunity people who had caught the (much milder, but still not nice) cowpox disease earlier.
Exposing kids to measles would just be insane, though.
And a fair number of those parents don’t realize, even today; that Chickenpox kills, it still does. It can be a very serious and lethal diseases. Prior to the vaccine there really was a well let’s get it over with while they’re young and healthy mentality which probably wasn’t the worst idea considering the numbers involved, but… just don’t want to encourage people avoiding the vaccine because of that.
Oh yeah, now that there is a vaccine it would be stupid to do.
At the time it made some sense since you were probably going to get the fucking thing at some point.