Pregnancy
In The Magical Fantasy Land Where This Anti-Vaxxer Lives, Measles Are ‘Just A Rash’
This morning, I subjected myself to a bleeding hemorrhoid of a blog post, and because I am a cruel woman, I am going to subject you to it, too. If you haven’t been vaccinated against raging stupidity, you might want to wear a surgical mask to protect yourself from the toxic fumes being emitted here.
If you get your medical information from the CDC and your pediatrician, a guy named Levi Quackenboss wants you to know that you are drinking the Big Pharma Kool-Aid. And you should be drinking his weird, conspiracy-flavored Kool-Aid instead! Really, who wouldn’t want to take medical advice from a guy whose About Me page looks like this?
His anti-vax blog featured a guest post yesterday written in response to a pro-vax open letter. And while the open letter that started it was its own flavor of ridiculous (pro-tip: do not threaten to tackle someone else’s kid on the sidewalk to inject them with an MMR vaccine, and do not invent a cancer diagnosis for your children for the sake for ‘creative license’), the anti-vaxxer response kicked the level of inanity up to 11. Is your protective gear in place? Then let’s dive in.
First of all he tries to turn the original author’s statement that public vaccination protects kids with cancer on its head, by claiming that chemotherapy patients can get the measles from people who have just gotten an MMR vaccine. Okay, first of all, no; second of all, what? And third of all, GOD. NO. Just no.
It’s true that the MMR vaccine contains a live, albeit weakened version of the three viruses it protects against – it’s just not true that people who get an MMR vaccine are contagious. (See also: the ‘weakened’ part of ‘weakened version’.) Co-opting cancer patients, who are actually in real danger from the teeming unvaxxed hordes, to prop up your sagging anti-vax agenda is the most offensive thing I’ve read today, which is really saying something.
The guest poster also dismisses out of hand the multitudes of studies that prove the safety and efficacy of vaccines (but somehow puts full trust in the crappily-done, long-since-retracted study that suggested there’s a link between vaccination and autism). Here’s a safety study you may have heard of: it’s called ‘the past fifty years’. You know, the several decades where five thousand people a year stopped dying of the measles? During that time period, vaccine injuries were a thing – but not as common a thing as they appear to be in the fantasy world where this author is living. One thing I can think of more common than an MMR vaccine injury? Dying of the measles before the vaccine was introduced.
