What is happening in Samoa is exactly what science and history tell us to expect when the measles virus is introduced into a population with low immunity. Sick, hospitalised, immune-damaged and sometimes dead children. And occasionally sick or dead adults. Most of you dedicated, hardcore, anti-vaccination pro-diseasers, likely wouldn’t have seen this first-hand because you’ve probably lived most of your lives in relative privilege. Most of you have been privileged to have clean water, widely available health care, big shiny hospitals, and most importantly – safe and bloody effective vaccines.

Anti-vaxxers hate our children.

The poisonous malignancy that is you, the hardcore anti-vaxxer, wishes harm upon our children and by default, upon us. Your tendrils extend into the latest measles-based tragedy playing out among Samoa and other Pasifika peoples.

The hardcore, not the unsure

To be clear, I’m not talking about those who don’t have access to vaccines nor am I referring to the vaccine-hesitant – those who aren’t sure about vaccines and vaccine schedules and worry about risks to their children. They have honest questions and concerns. And, for the most part, those concerns could be addressed with care, explanation and time. Communication and access to the right people could probably do wonders. I’m talking about you predators out there who actively prey upon these concerns.

You are a well-organised malevolence

You malicious profiteers prey upon uncertainties and drive a wedge into our doubts. You sow dissent, distrust, fear and anger. And this is your time, isn’t it? You have many avenues for your free lying and too little being done to shut them down. Even journalism is too often seeking “balance” but actually only achieving false equivalence; lending weight to crackpot theories without declaring them as such. By doing so, you have subverted the popular media, planting doubts and creating belief in the magical preventative properties of…water?

So you feel empowered. And important. And extra special. But you are in fact just confused, fearful, out of your depth, suffering from delusions of importance, playing a game, wrong, and by virtue of your impact, malevolent.

Your organisation of anti-vaccination evil wants you to see children crying – your own and others – in pain, or unconscious in a hospital. It wants us to watch our children get sick, succumb to otherwise easily preventable diseases like measles. Diseases science and medicine have worked hard for decades to bring to near extinction. Only to have you wade in and fuck it all up. You work to amplify the past lies of now influential anti-health advocates and profit-driven marketeers. And sometimes that means you want us to watch our child die. You must hate so much.

Too harsh? Bullshit.

Death is exactly the endgame you selfish, malice-filled scumbags are playing for when you persuade parents to look away from decades of science and instead look towards some unsubstantiated pile of lies, false hopes, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, easier options; always utter and complete foolishness.

You try to change other’s health decisions for your personal gain

In some instances, others pull the strings of you acolytes of the anti-science faith. Your church often seeks to sell us something. It might be promoting an untested and potentially unsafe magic product or it could be exchanging tickets to your rants for cash from our wallet. It may be trying to pass around the plate in exchange for your latest DVD of falsehoods and false equivalence. It may even want us to watch your preaching in exchange for a paid subscription. There’s often money at the end of your selectively coloured rainbow. You aren’t driven by new knowledge, data, accuracy and care for our health.

Yours are the actions of unscrupulous people who want our children to be put at risk and to experience misery in their young lives. Is profit and your moment in the spotlight truly worth this pain? Can’t you use all this energy for good instead? Can’t you see that you have not done a single thing that is good for the lives of children? Nothing. You’ve achieved nothing good. You’ve wasted some of the short time we have on this planet on hurting the lives of innocent children.

Science isn’t perfect but it works damn hard to be. Quackery just doesn’t give a shit

Science isn’t perfect. There have been issues with vaccines. Issues that are out in the public domain to be read about. Issues that science and medicine have sought to fix as soon as they’ve appeared because science cares about our children. But better yet, issues science and medicine have worked their collective arses off to avoid in the first place.

You may have heard of clinical trials? Where’s your magic rock clinical trial? I know you plague-profiteers love to dump on big Pharma, but delivering drugs through a company means it benefits them to get it right and produce safe, effective products. Yes, they make a profit from a product, because they are companies. Of course, you also profit from your woo products. Why not get your magic spray put through a clinical trial? Then, when (it inevitably will not ever be) proven safe and effective, you can make the same profits from your product and have the last laugh. You won’t do that though, Because what you’re pedalling doesn’t work, and is more likely to put the health of our children at risk, and you know it. Anti-vaxxer, you’re not special, you’re a danger to the rest of us and you should be treated as such by the media and by governments the world over.

Science does lengthy meticulous work of the sort that you will never see put into ensuring the safety of the latest unicorn-tears-filled magic oil. Science does this because it wants a better world. You pro-cancer believers denounce science for working hard because you hate our children.

Like any medicine or anything at all in life really, there is a risk. But these are rare risks. Less risk than if our children were to get infected by that virus.

Risk exists everywhere – do you understand risk?

A seat-belt can hurt your chest while it saves your life during a car crash. Which is the more worrisome risk here? Is it short-term pain or is it death? (hint: its death) A sore arm or measles-induced encephalitis? A headache or immune amnesia. A brief fever or death?

Any of these example bad outcomes are rare – from a car or from a vaccine or from an infection – but if you drive and don’t wear a seat-belt – you risk death. So you wear a seat-belt.

You wait for the crossing sign or at least wait for a safe gap in the traffic before walking onto a busy city road, even if it makes you 2 minutes later. You reduce your risk of injury every day. Vaccines reduce the risk of disease. It’s just that we don’t give them to ourselves, we get someone else to do that, so we cede some control over our life. But not much. And we can reduce that loss of control by reading up on vaccination beforehand with great resources like this and this.

Real-life example playing out right now in Samoa

Samoa had fewer than half of its population immunised against measles before this epidemic. Precisely why, I don’t know but at such levels, one must look at failures of a range of things. Humans are hopeless at remembering stuff for their health and their default position is usually set to “easy”. We need reminders, plans, educational materials. We need help. This is why we have leaders. To take care of shit for us as a society.

Nonetheless, the absence of immune people in Samoa has let measles do what the world’s most easily transmitted, solely human virus does best. Measles has spread like a wildfire.

Look at the damn slope on that freakin’ curve! Measles will keep on spreading at ridiculous and dangerous levels in Samoa until vaccines are deployed or until enough of the population are immune from wild infection. Only then will the virus be unable to maintain its transmission.

History repeats. Again.

If vaccines aren’t accepted in Samoa, then we’ll see more sickness, misery and most definitely more death.

We’ve seen this play out before. There is history to provide evidence. There is science to explore and explain mechanisms. There is medicine to prevent disease. It’s all there, it’s all known, it’s not new.

Coming in at this stage and just making shit up because you want to feel special doesn’t change any objective truths. There are already known facts. There is reality. Vaccines work. They are safe. Measles can be a bad virus. It can kill. The vaccine is not always safe, measles does not always kill. However, the virus is faaaar more likely to get your child admitted to hospital for serious illness than vaccine is likely to do your child harm.

Your anti-vax conspiracies don’t survive in a reality where facts are supported and well-pitched communication is commonplace. We reject your unconscionably dark, fear-fuelled universe and stick to what we know and what we have shown works to make our children healthier and safer than those who came before.

At writing, 32 children and 1 adult have died due to measles virus or measles-induced complications. 13 of those deaths – so far – are in babies less than 1 year old.

LESS THAN 1 YEAR OLD.

Why? Basically, because this is exactly what measles does! Not to every person infected – don’t be deliberately thick, anti-vaxxer! And we don’t see it in well-vaccinated countries because vaccines.

You pro-plague trolls would have us return to the vaccination levels that would let this happen everywhere. You know these risks. You aren’t stupid and you’ll have read, but willfully chosen to ignore, the historical science and medicine that supports all of this. The experimental evidence and observations that you have none of.

But you don’t give a shit, do you anti-vaxxer? No. You don’t. Your words and actions – the evidence is there for all to see. It betrays you for what you are. You hate our children. You hate our society. You hate healthy and happy people. You crave only the pain of others. You want more sickness, more cost, more fear and more heartache.

Whatever it is you are, it’s antisocial and selfish

Maybe it isn’t hatred. Maybe you are just extremely antisocial, lacking in empathy, guilt or remorse and driven by selfishness, profit and fear. If so, I don’t empathise because what you do is too pernicious for that.

Perhaps it’s all some sort of game to pass the time for you. Maybe you’re only doing this for physical or emotional profit. The time I’ve spent engaging you has revealed you to be very angry people. Very quick to abuse, to belittle and to spew hate when approached without the same. This may be in reaction to what you see as our pro-vaccine arrogance and aura of being superior. I concede that. But your unwillingness to chat, learn, or accept reality means we never get a chance to show you that we also have fears as well as hopes and dreams.

You peddle memes, made-up graphs, unreferenced text, out-of-context quotes and non-existent data in order to hawk your brand of lies to a susceptible and vulnerable group. You speak in a way that you think makes you sound clever or like the experts you despise; often reflecting the words used against you back upon them. Somehow this fills a need in your empty soul doesn’t it? It makes you feel special.

But really, if all those preventable deaths due to measles don’t rip your heart out and make you look in a mirror, you’ve failed as a human being.

If you’re sitting there and leveraging some small-minded screwed up excuse about “oh hygiene and the third world and they’re far away/brown/less than me” – go to hell right now.

If even the possibility that some of your anti-vaxxer bullshit had any role to play in any one of those baby’s deaths, then I hope it haunts you to your grave.

If you swayed a single parent to avoid a vaccine for a child who later died, you have been an accomplice to any misery that follows from their infection, as much as the virus that caused it. I hope that misery is visited upon you as well. You had a chance to inform that parent, to help them make the right decision, and instead, you used that chance to cause harm. I don’t think there is any place for you in society and you should really take your friendless, pitiful, uncaring, selfish existence away from the rest of us so we can be healthy and work towards a better world. Just piss off.