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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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Your central argument fails the logic test. If so-called antivaxxers hate other people’s children, then they must also hate their own children by failing to vaccinate them This does not make sense because nearly all parents want the best for their children, in particular good health.
You are also engaged in reductionism by attributing measles deaths to the single variable of ‘antivaxxers’. The mortality rate for measles is low to almost non-existent in otherwise healthy children, so the high mortality rate in Samoa must be due to other factors.
You also disregard the fact that vaccination is voluntary in Australia, so parents who do not vaccinate their children are acting entirely within the law, so should not be the subject of hate speech. If vaccination is so important, why hasn’t Australia made vaccination compulsory?
“Nearly all parents”….except anti-vaxxers apparently. As I say, look at their actions. These actions speak for themselves. They cause harm to children and those around them. So it makes sense.
2.”If even the possibility that some of your anti-vaxxer bullshit had any role to play”. Hmm. Not very supportive of your claim here “Mak”. Please show me whereabouts in this post I have been “attributing measles deaths to the single variable of ‘antivaxxers’”. Actually, I state that “one must look at failures of a range of things”. Did you actually read the post? Kinda looks like you didn’t.
“The mortality rate for measles is low to almost non-existent in otherwise healthy children”. You’re right, in vaccinated children or in nations with a lot of vaccinated people around those children.
Continuing on your trains of strange logic, you’ve pulled up something else fallacious. I disregard it; the topic wasn’t relevant to my post. Parents in Australia aren’t required by law to vaccinate because MOST OF THEM VACCINATE VOLUNTARILY. Anti-vaccination sentiment is in the vast minority. A small sliver of the world. You see they are the smart ones. They see the evidence, listen to the experts and do the best for the children they love. They vaccinate. As we did with both of our children. As my partner and I did thanks to our parents. We keep our children healthy because we love them.
If you could see me now, I am standing and clapping. You have nailed exactly how I feel right now!
Except, regarding Somoa specifically and other campaigns vaguely, all those who have been infected in this recent outbreak with measles and died have been recently vaccinated – for measles. When the facts are reviewed, and the falsities removed, it becomes apparent the vaccines are the cause. The vaccinations are stopping, so will the deaths.
You are completely wrong here. Woefully wrong. Dangerously wrong. The infections in Samoa have been with measles viruses oo the D8 genotype; the vaccine virus is an entirely different, non-circulating virus (genotype A).
This is a very basic fact to get wrong. So the rest of your garbage words are based on a complete and utter misunderstanding of the virology underpinning measles. Are you trying to scare people with this ignorance? The vaccination wasn’t started until after the outbreak was already well underway. How can you comment on something about which you know so very little about?? Don’t you feel guilty that this might hurt children?
Keep hitting them where it hurts, Ian, keep speaking truth and keep being harsh. These privileged anti-vaxxers are exactly what you have described.
Well said Ian, I wonder how old Frank Winterstein feels about his fellow Samoans, presume wife Tay isn’t so confident to take the kids on a home visit back to Samoa anytime soon to ‘spread the word’ according what her five neurones came up with. #tayswaytobeingadope
Thank you for saying exactly what I want to say to every anti-vaxxers out there.
Thank you – I have shared this on Facebook. Didn’t see this before but it’s exactly how I feel. I see a lot of people who either intentionally misrepresent the science or parrot those who do without any understanding of what they are saying. This is becoming a nightmare of ignorance. Thank you for this hard hitting article- exactly what the doctor ordered.
Rudro
provaxxers hate your children..on social media they have outright hope they die..so stfu.
Hello. I have also shared your page on Facebook. I am appalled and worried at the tsunami of lies and conspiracies by antivaxxers on social media. We must all fight this with all our might.