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

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/30/amid-measles-outbreak-anti-vaccine-doctor-revels-in-his-notoriety/

in a lot of other countries this dude would probably be in jail, as would parents of children who refuse to get them vaccinated

Amid this outbreak, Wolfson actively urges people to avoid vaccines. “We should be getting measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, these are the rights of our children to get it,” he told the Arizona Republic. “We do not need to inject chemicals into ourselves and into our children in order to boost our immune system.” He added: “I’m a big fan of what’s called paleo-nutrition, so our children eat foods that our ancestors have been eating for millions of years…. That’s the best way to protect.”

someone should beat him over the head with a tree branch, that would be very paleo.

when paleo bros start to get a little too off the chain i like to joke to myself "is low infant mortality paleo?" and i guess he kind of called my bluff huh

Someone needs to send him to a cemetery to look at the birth and death dates of some of our more recent ancestors, see how many of them are < 5 years, and tell him how many of those were measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox.

yeah whenever i hear this anti-vax assholes i think of the pre-20th century cemetery near where i lived in CT and how each family plot seemed to have several tiny gravestones for children who died in their first five or six years.

xpost

wow, kismet i guess. :(

although maybe he's secretly a malthusian?

framing disease transmission as a "right" is legit creepy

feel like there's some unstated 'survival of the fittest' bullshit with that creep, like 'do you even survive measles bro?'

I think I'll start eating that food that doesn't have any chemicals in it. Do you get that at Whole Foods, or . . . ?

IIRC he eats only prairie grass that grows up between the cracks of the sidewalk

newsflash: human bodies are composed of chemicals

Wolfson himself came to his anti-vaccination stance late in life. “I’m the son of a cardiologist,” he told The Post. “I was trained to believe in the power of vaccines…. And going through school, as a medical student you don’t question anything. You don’t question what’s going on.” Then in 2002, Wolfson, originally from Chicago, moved to Arizona where he met his wife, a chiropractor, who “opened my eyes.”

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CulMybUv-zI/UqLtzZqT7ZI/AAAAAAAAPRg/XpxRUYmvngk/s1600/neo.gif

chiropractic is a good example of a kind of psuedo-scientific bullshit "medicine" that a lot of smart people seem to believe in or at least tolerate b/c it seems harmless (and indeed some chiro treatments might do some good, but it's not because the underlying theory isn't bunk).

one of my mom's friends has a daughter-in-law who didn't want her kids to be vaccinated. it's a good thing i didn't know this when i saw her at a holiday party, because i think these folks deserve the strongest contempt and ought to be publicly shamed whenever possible. that said, i kind of /understand/ the mentality, but for an education person it's still contemptible.

educated

Paleo anti-vax
http://media.giphy.com/media/gMHTtIYrabA6k/giphy.gif

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.

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

I work almost exclusively with people with autoimmune diseases and who take immunosuppresive drugs and I am getting so many phone calls about the measles epidemic. They're more susceptible because of their immune suppression and they can't get boosters because the MMR is a live vaccine.

xxp There are only 6 states in the US that do not allow some criminal and civil exemptions from the law for parents who choose faith healing over medicine. You think they're going to get up their asses about vaccines?

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

― Οὖτις, Friday, January 30, 2015 2:31 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Charge them with bioterrorism imho.

xxp There are only 6 states in the US that do not allow some criminal and civil exemptions from the law for parents who choose faith healing over medicine. You think they're going to get up their asses about vaccines?

― Οὖτις Δαυ & τηε Κνιγητσ (Phil D.), Friday, January 30, 2015 1:42 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which are those 6 states btw?

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!