So, my an online american friend said"My mom didn’t want to vaccine vax cuzs autism". Is he joking? I know many people say thing like that but i thought they all were joking?
In my country which is a third world country no one believe shit like that even my Grand mother who is illiterate and religious don’t believe thing like that and knows the benefit of vaccine.
Yes, there are genuine idiots in this country that are against vaccination.
There are also a plethora of foreign idiots and trolls spreading misinformation about everything including stances on vaccination. Judging by the quotation you shared it’s impossible to tell if that is an actual person’s thought, though, because it is not written in English.
We very, very much wish it were just a joke. Diseases that were basically eliminated in the US are making a comeback. And we just appointed an antivaxxer as our health secretary, who also has proposed sending people on antidepressants and ADHD drugs to work camps for years to “re-parent” them.
It’s fucking terrifying here right now, at least for anyone paying attention.
antidepressants and ADHD drugs to work camps for years to “re-parent” them.
… WTF. I hope that mfr get squashed to death.
Some anti-vax people I know personally are my boss, 2 of the office trolls, the guy in the garage, the stinky guy who sits next to me, my friend’s mom, etc etc. People are fucking stupid yo.
anti vaxxing is a thing that real people really engage in, they are in fact, stupid. But it is unfortunately real, just look into the resurgence in measles outbreaks and TB and shit, that’s why.
ur friend very well may be joking, but i can assure it’s not a complete meme.
If this is the case, try to convince your friend to talk to their doctor about vaccinations. They may decide, for themselves, that they’re comfortable with it.
If people were smart enough to listen to informed opinions, and listen to facts, they wouldnt have become antivax in the first place.
We’re talking about the child of anti-vaccine parents, OP’s friend didn’t say they were anti-vaccine, they said that their parents were so they were not vaccinated as a child.
So, as a friend, OP should try to convince his friend to talk to a doctor about it. People like that are often sheltered from conflicting opinions and may still be reachable.
Not just America, up here in Canada too. It’s real.
It’s a difficult problem to sum up because there are so many reasons this is happening, and I don’t think it’s all malicious.
At the core there is a general disrespect for any authority in American culture and it’s easy to believe stories that a government-mandated medical intervention is somehow not as safe as they say.
It doesn’t help that there have been government programs in the past that were harmful and the knowledge was only made public after it was too late. Very few people believe the government has the people’s best interest in mind.
Individuals are only capable of understanding a very limited amount at one time, and rely on their tribe to inform them of almost everything else. These days there’s a tsunami of information that is impossible to process completely. So it’s just human nature to trust a small selection of sources and does usually offer a survival advantage.
So it’s not hard to see how smart people can fall for misinformation especially when they are inclined to doubt authority.
He is not joking and while it is most relevant in the United States it is not exclusive to us.
gulps
do you really want to know?
Yes, absolutely, and this shit gets so much stupider it is mindblowing, dealing with anybody right of the center (and plenty of people all over the political spectrum) is a constant wild west duel where you have to decide in a snap whether someone believes their batshit crazy ideas as part of a straight faced shockingly amateur grift or whether honest to God that person would literally die for that stupid of a belief…
like… Exhibit A: See how easily Elizabeth Holmes ripped off a huge number of the most powerful and revered people in US society, culturally and in terms of real power.
Yes. There are people who believe it. I can’t explain it, they have the education, they have the information, but for whatever reason they just want to believe a conspiracy theory instead.
Mostly the right-wing leaning Americans, who don’t like anything that costs them money even if it contributes towards a better society. They say they hate Socialism in all its forms, but had absolutely no problem accepting stimulus handouts. They are the pure leeches of our country.
Left-wing leaning Americans tend to believe science even if it comes as a slight inconvenience to themselves, that includes things that sometimes cost them money.
This is an oversimplification. I have met plenty of people who are progressive or Democrat that believe some pretty wild things about vaccines and western medicine in general. Don’t underestimate hippies.
Yeah, the whole thing first took hold in left-leaning crunchy all-natural circles.
Nah, the roots of anti-vax was conservative conspiracy nuts from the moment they were a thing.
It did spread to the granola types but it’s older than their existence.
This is not limited to Americans. This site is dumb. Idiots everywhere are susceptible to misinformation.
We are actually that stupid.
Back in the 90s a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield was bribed by a pharmaceutical company that made separate vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella to come up with a study to discredit the combined mmr vaccine. He found a bunch of parents in an antivax society and twisted the results of a very weighted questionnaire to demonstrate a link between MMR and the 'tism. It was quickly discredited, but the damage was done. He was stripped of his medical licence after that.
Hbomb’s video is a good overview if you have about two hours to spare.
For the paper he published - he got his subjects at a birthday party. Not all of them even had autism. He was positing that autism had something to do with the digestive track, and they did shit like lumbar punctures on some of the kids (one iirc had serious complications - they basically tortured autistic children with a bunch of painful and complicated medical tests).
The fact that The Lancet published a paper with such horrific failures in methodology, ethics, and even fucking sample size is an embarrassment.
There’s a number of points this comment misses. First, it wasn’t pharmaceutical companies, but moms group of autistic children that approached him.
[I]n 1995, while conducting research into Crohn’s disease, he was approached by Rosemary Kessick, the parent of a child with autism, who was seeking help with her son’s bowel problems and autism; Kessick ran a group called Allergy Induced Autism. In 1996, Wakefield turned his attention to researching possible connections between the MMR vaccine and autism.
And the time, he was still a well regarded scientist and doctor:
At the time of his MMR research study, Wakefield was senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine
This was also published in 1998 in The Lancet an important medical journal, but the controversy didn’t start with this publication, but his press conference after the publication where he did advocate for single vaccines and not a combined MMR. Pretty poor form and highly criticized at the time.
The media took this and ran with it. It caused wide spread misinformation about autism and the MMR vaccine. But it was also a media outlet that began to tear apart the claims in 2004.
It wasn’t retracted until 2010 and a full write up about what went wrong in the BMJ in 2011. There was a lot of criticism before then, but I was also highly cited as well.
There’s a lot of lessons to be learned here and that is best done with the full story.
Don’t forget Oprah Winfrey giving
MelissaJenny McCarthy a mouthpiece in front of every suburban mom in the US. We have her to thank for both that and “Dr” Phil.If I recall correctly that was Jenny McCarthy, but correct otherwise (not looking to see Melissa McCarthy take the flak for that!). The amount of ugly pseudoscience and bullshit that has emerged through Oprah’s platform is horrifying.
oh FFS I mixed up names, will fix it
It’s crazy to think about the thousands of lost lives stemming from a single fraudulent study.
It makes me sad that the piece of shit Andrew Wakefield is still alive while so many better people than him have died for his bullshit.
Just wait until OP learns about us taking horse paste during covid
There are more than a few mentally defective folks that believe vaccines cause a variety of maladies.
