jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

Assuming the info I'm looking at is the most recent (viqa http://childrenshealthcare.org/?page_id=24), they are: Massachusetts, North Carolina, Nebraska, Maryland, Oregon and Hawaii.

Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana and Arkansas are the most lenient. They allow faith-healing parents to claim a religious exemption for prosecution from negligent homicide, manslaughter and capital murder!

In conclusion, fuck America.

man, moving to Hawaii gets more appealing every day.

From a legal standpoint, forcing people to vaccinate is a tough sell. There's a long and well established legal precedent that nobody, government or private individual, can force a medical procedure on you without your consent. In cases where that has been ignored you get things like forced sterilization of women of color in North Carolina or the Tuskeegee Experiment.

I generally scoff at slippery slope arguments and legal absolutism and my god anti-vaxxers make me furious but requiring someone engage in an unwanted medical procedure does not feel good to me.

i think coupling that with the already stressful aspect of giving a kid a shot...yeah it's not good.

unfortunately OTM

There could be a poll for "thread title that predicated the next major world disaster"...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/us/as-measles-spreads-in-us-so-does-anxiety.html

ugh the single loony anti-vaxxer on my fb timeline is a formerly cool Brit who is now somehow living in Idaho and banging on about 'real food' all the time

A random old lady at the bus stop told me to keep Ivy away from other children because of measles.

I honestly fail to see how this isn't child abuse and, more generally, a prosecutable crime with regard to endangering the welfare of the public-at-large.

― Indiana Jones and the Sphincter of the Sphinx (Old Lunch), Friday, January 30, 2015 7:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree but ... is endangering the public welfare an actual crime?

― Οὖτις, Friday, January 30, 2015 7:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How about just endangering the welfare of a specific child? If a vulnerable child caught measles from one of these unvaccinated kids, and died, could the parents of the unvaccinated kid not be held criminally responsible?

it would be very difficult to prove transmission.

Yeah. These fuckin assholes though.

From a legal standpoint, forcing people to vaccinate is a tough sell. There's a long and well established legal precedent that nobody, government or private individual, can force a medical procedure on you without your consent. In cases where that has been ignored you get things like forced sterilization of women of color in North Carolina or the Tuskeegee Experiment.

I generally scoff at slippery slope arguments and legal absolutism and my god anti-vaxxers make me furious but requiring someone engage in an unwanted medical procedure does not feel good to me.

― about a dozen duck supporters (carl agatha), Friday, January 30, 2015 3:13 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

children are not understood to have autonomy to make medical decisions for themselves. it is not without controversy, but forcing a parent to vaccinate/treat their child has a pretty wide acceptance in the bioethical literature, and is done in practice. obviously this doesn't apply to adults, who are free to refuse any treatment they want

Same friend I posted about above posted this crap today. Keep in mind she and her husband are both college educated people.

There is very little need for the hype you've been hearing. We heard the same about the ebola and just how many contracted ebola from Amber Vinson's visit to Ohio? None. It was all over the news inciting panic for days. Measles is no worse a disease than chicken pox, and used to be considered a rite of passage during childhood.
http://vaccineimpact.com/…/zero-u-s-measles-deaths-in-10-y…/

http://vaccineimpact.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/01/deaths_in_the_us_during_the_past_10_years_due_to_measles.jpg

I replied:

You're smarter than this. There were no reported deaths because measles was considered to have been eradicated, like polio and smallpox. Go visit a cemetery that's at least 75 years old and see how many headstones contain dates of birth/death that are 5-6 years apart because the children used to die from diseases before vaccines were developed. Go find people a decade a little older than us who went deaf after suffering measles. Go find people our parents' ages who now suffer from painful, horrifying shingles because they had chicken pox as children.

It's also very misleading to compare a very rare disease that can only be transmitted by direct contact of blood with the mucous membranes and can barely live outside a host to one that can be easily spread through coughing and sneezing.

https://annamirer.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/i-read-the-anti-vaccine-doctors-manifesto-so-you-dont-have-to/

Woof this guy hates vaccines and, for some reason, laundry.

I say it over and over, my kid gets a fever and I worry, I don't know how parents who don't vaccinate do not worry...their kid gets a fever, it could be the flu or rubella...

So after someone pointed out to her that 145,000 people worldwide died from the measles last year, she responded:

Okay, so 145,000 died of measles in the entire world. There isn't a link on NPR to show where any of the information came from, but let's run with that. Since there are 7.1B people in the world, any individual person's risk of dying from measles is about .002%. For another bit of perspective, more people were involved in traffic crashes in Ohio alone in 2013 which is a 2.3% risk. Of those, 4800 people died which is then a .04%. So my chance of dying in a vehicle accident in my own state is higher than my chance *in the entire world* of dying due to measles.

I had to point out to her that STATISTICS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY (/Morbo); and that even if they did, by her own reasoning 10.8 vaccine-related deaths per year in a nation of 300,000,000 people represents a 3.6X10^-8 percent danger, making it 55 million times more likely that you will die of measles than from an MMR vaccine.

I also made a point of noting that both her children suffer from food allergies and have to carry EpiPens, which are made of "chemicals," and that the LD50 for subcutaneous epinephrine is much lower than that of the dreader mercury that she fears so much.

I'm all for keeping the low risk in perspective when thinking about things that can harm your child. But the thing is that low risk is completely preventable.

Don't want to vaccinate your children? Then home-school, or better, join other anti-vaxxers in some anti-science private school.

This seems like a popular campaign program for pro-science folks to retake school boards.

Is it de trop to be all *sadface* "well I hope your beautiful unvaccinated daughter does not get rubella later in life when pregnant unless you want your precious baby grandchildren to be DEAF and have CATARACTS"

I mean apparently "your own kid and a whole bunch other kids might die of pneumonia as a complication of measles" is not enough but perhaps bringing out the hypothetical newborn grandchildren is what is needed, idk

(is it de trop for non-Francophones to say de trop? why yes, yes it is)

Stats can be manipulated, and 'studies' always contradict themselves, so our trust must be placed in these rogue wizards, regardless of 'science'

How courageous to fly in the face of accepted medical wisdom. I hear all they do in medical school is have sex and abort things.

to be honest, i think this outbreak will see a major decline in the number of parents unwilling to vaccinate their children

silver linings etc.

I think the data is showing that might already be the case, from what Ive read. Which is good!

http://www.vox.com/2015/2/2/7963837/obama-vaccine-autism

i missed this at the time

"We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it."

--Barack Obama, Pennsylvania Rally, April 21, 2008.

"It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise among children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

--John McCain, Texas town hall meeting, February 29, 2008.

assuming cynicism, what's the upside politically to pandering to these whackaloons? did they really seem that powerful? water under the bridge i guess...

getting them to give you money

All the money they've saved on vaccines for their kids is yours for the taking.

http://www.motherjones.com/files/mickeymeasles.jpg

So Chris Christie, who was willing to be a complete asshole and unnecessarily quarantine medical workers who had traveled to countries with Ebola outbreaks, is willing to pander to people who are willing to forego a harmless vaccine that prevents a disease with 90% communicability.

OK then.

i've read a couple quotes from that Wolfson creep the past couple of days, including one where he placed the blame on kids getting sick (and one getting leukemia!!) on them being vaccinated, and boasted that his children were 'pure'.

2008 Bam quote is jawdropping; no wonder Bill Maher gave him a million

here's some contemporaneous blog posts that suggest O's vax angle was a little less pandery than the anti-vaxers wanted

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/04/22/hillary-clinton-and-barack-obama-descend/
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/09/09/barack-obama-provaccine/

i seriously have no memory of any of this

And pretty much the opposite of what he's saying now:

"I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations," Obama said in a pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC's Savannah Guthrie on Sunday. "The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/01/barack-obama-kids-vaccinated-measles_n_6591452.html

So Chris Christie, who was willing to be a complete asshole and unnecessarily quarantine medical workers who had traveled to countries with Ebola outbreaks, is willing to pander to people who are willing to forego a harmless vaccine that prevents a disease with 90% communicability.

^^^this

dude's willingness to use health threats to score political points is so gross

i posted this link, http://www.voicesforvaccines.org/growing-up-unvaccinated/, and my friend instantly liked it and shared it to her own fb wall - which i thought was interesting, since i remember her being incredibly anti-vax years ago. i wondered if maybe she didn't bother reading it, and totally misjudged the title... yep, she's deleted the link from her fb wall today.

i think anti-vaxxers are starting to double down on their opposition but it seems like they're quietly moving away from the autism link and are going in a more general but equally specious 'don't pump my kids full of chemicals' direction.

would the same people deny their kids such things as: chemotherapy, anaesthetic, fluoride, acne cream, tylenol, etc. etc. etc.?

don't answer that, maybe...

i get chills when i think about this shit

lol at Flouride.

btw someone on FB yesterday posted "If my kid can't bring peanut butter to school, yours shouldn't be able to bring measles" or somesuch.

REALLY, schools are banning peanut butter bcz some kids are allergic? Strikes me as a li'l bit fascistic...

that has been a thing for a while iirc

balloons too.

or green playdough

balloons full of peanut butter still ok.

Nut allergies have gotten a lot more common than when we were kids, but it's pretty crazy because for severe reactions PEOPLE REALLY HAVE TO INGEST THE NUTS!

They are crispy fried chicken wings.

But Jenny McCarthy seemed intent upon only pretending to eat the high cholesterol snack as she attended McDonald's Mighty Wing launch party in New York, on Sunday.

Despite the 40-year-old's apparent refusal to ingest the treat, she was clearly having fun teasing herself with the greasy poultry as she dangled it seductively in front of her full lips.

And she seemed to get some pleasure out of frustrating herself with the white meat as she posed for the cameras.

Positioning the wing mere inches from her mouth, Jenny made goo goo eyes while salivating over the forbidden flesh, which was encased in fried dough.

Wearing her light tresses in a smooth pile over her shoulders, the chat show host opted for a simple navy blue dress.

The frock showcased her lean and toned legs as it barely covered her sun-kissed thighs.

Completing her getup was a pair of tan platform wedges as she smiled throughout the fast food centred event.

Nut allergies have gotten a lot more common than when we were kids, but it's pretty crazy because for severe reactions PEOPLE REALLY HAVE TO INGEST THE NUTS!

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Monday, February 2, 2015 5:30 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the idea is that kids are too stupid not to eat stuff when it's at school and they aren't under direct immediate supervision

really glad i grew up in the 1980s