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So depressing. If you're not vaccinating your child, you are putting the following people at risk:

- Other idiots like yourself who chose not to vaccinate their child and their very unlucky children.

- Vaccinated people (because a vaccine is never 100% effective).

- Babies too young to be vaccinated.

And of course, you are taking part in resurrecting a disease that had been officially announced as eradicated in 2000.

Good job, anti vaccine people, you ignorant, medieval retards.

> Vaccinated people (because a vaccine is never 100% safe).

s/safe/effective

Also, I think you should rewrite your post without the insulting words in it. Writing it as such may be cathartic, but it is ineffective in convincing anyone.

You're right, effective is more accurate.

I picked my wording very carefully. I'm not one to use insults lightly but this topic enrages me. It's one thing to make choices that are detrimental to yourself, it's worse to make such choices that impact your children (who are helpless) but I think it's the ultimate disgrace to make choices that endanger the entire population.

So that means you're also against smoking and drinking...? Not trying to be snarky - but there are LOTS of activities that are socially acceptable that endanger others. And they are probably a whole lot more dangerous overall than lack of vaccination. (For the record, my children and I are vaccinated).
Smoking and drinking do not necessarily endanger others. You can smoke by yourself, or drink without driving etc.

Vaccination is not the same, unless you intend to quarantine your kids forever.

Smoking and drinking aren't highly contagious and usually don't kill in days/weeks.
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I choose not to smoke or drink my self.

What others decide to do to themselves within a safe context that does not endanger my self or others is the business of the consenting adults involved as long as it is only them involved.

I fully support legalizing, regulating, and taxing everything. Some things might be too dangerous to allow outside of carefully setup environments.

There will of course be things that someone could come up with which shouldn't be allowed and obvious reasons for that. However there are vastly many things which are safe, or dangerous mostly because they are not legal, and may be interesting that are not presently legal in many places.

ignoring the whole vax/anti-vax thing* i am really curious about people who are enraged about such things and why a particular topic like this enrages them? are you enraged about all things which endanger the population? or just some?

a lot of the time i see this sort of rage surface most assuredly (in myself and other people) for topics which:

  a.i am definitely not guilty
  b.someone else definitely is guilty
  c.a lot of other people agree with me.. but not everyone
your argument as put forward satisfies these three points.

as to your stated arguments, do you really think anti-vaxers want to make bad choices for their children? or are you saying you should be judged according the outcomes of actions, whether you had the correct foresight or not? the first is demonising them to make yourself feel superior / the second is demonising all parents for the myriad of things they do everyday to damage their children. which is it?

"I think it's the ultimate disgrace to make choices that endanger the entire population." once again here, is the prior knowledge / intent important? here if you are suggesting, foresight or not, it is bad to endanger the human race - as a logical test of sorts, what if it turns out that overpopulation is the biggest danger to the human race? would that change your stance? likewise, if intent is important, do you stop driving your suv? or is it just about scale? do you stop using fossil fuels?

the thing that gets me about the vax/antivax, is that neither side really understand the complexity of the argument. i actually know as many people whose children have had serious reactions to vaccinations as i do parents who children have had serious preventable illnesses. now, i know statistically this is due to vaccines preventing a whole lot more illnesses, and that for certain illnesses there is a minimum threshold of vaccinated people below which the effectiveness is seriously compromised. but at this very point what does it matter to the parents if they have just as much chance to hurt their child either way?

most anti-vaxers i have run into actually want to pick and choose the vaccinations and the timing, rather than the couple of hundred they are forced to get by the state (in three or four different injections). is it better to get all or none? is it better to force them into a position of getting all or none?

if you don't understand your own arguments, or the people you are trying to convince otherwise, how do you know you are not just reacting emotionally? who does it serve for you to get enraged?

*(because clearly it is just a stats vs economics thing, hardly something to get riled up about)

> ignoring the whole vax/anti-vax thing* i am really curious about people who are enraged about such things and why a particular topic like this enrages them? are you enraged about all things which endanger the population? or just some?

I am selfishly enraged by the actions of people who put my children's health at risk (especially since they were premature and they are prone to catching a lot of bad stuff) because these people choose to ignore facts (most of the time for religious reasons).

I am selflessly enraged at anyone who endangers other people because I have empathy for these people and very low tolerance for irrationality.

man, everything is not black and white. you put your children's lives and the lives of others at risk everyday, due to your ignorance, ineptitude, or indifference. that is life.

what you are talking about is an issue of scale.. grey area stuff. a compounding issue of lots of people choosing to do something that collectively causes a major problem. not unlike driving as it happens (ie. chance of accident, increase in pollution). 1.3 million people died last year as a result of car accidents. have you looked into the correlation between driven kilometres and car accidents? do you care?

you did not answer my questions. are you selfishly enraged at only actions which you do not engage in, that put your childrens health at risk? how otherwise is this not just an emotional argument? who does it serve for you to get enraged?

> as to your stated arguments, do you really think anti-vaxers want to make bad choices for their children?

Of course not, they think they are doing the right thing, in much the same way that Mormons refuse blood transfusions for themselves and their children or that certain parents kill their children so they can get to heaven faster.

You're still building a straw man, though.

The intention is completely irrelevant here, what matters is the safety of the children and of the rest of the population.

Wrong religion. I think you mean Jehovah's Witnesses.
um.. firstly, not a straw man (seriously? and then you start crapping on about mormons?), a logical reduction to find out if you think the consequences of believing that either the intention is important or not.

so how do you differentiate between "intention is completely irrelevant" and (from your other comment) "because these people choose to ignore facts". are we back to thinking that they are 'choosing' in bad faith? they believe because they do not understand. surely the way to reach them is to build an understanding rather than get angry at them about their beliefs.

> i actually know as many people whose children have had serious reactions to vaccinations as i do parents who children have had serious preventable illnesses.

You're trying to use anecdotal data as data. That's not how science works.

Scientist are way, way ahead of you. Adverse effects are the number one thing that is studied when a new vaccine is being considered for public use. At least in the US (and most of the industrialized world), if a vaccine receives approval for wide use, it's because the statistical risk of adverse effects and the actual adverse effects are completely benign compared to the positive effect that the vaccine will have on the population.

way to miss the fucking point. go on, read it again.. (or the first time for that matter.)

at a certain point with the effectiveness of vaccines, the adverse effects actually start to outnumber the people still being effected. the point at which people start to notice this is perhaps an order of magnitude lower than the reality. science is not how people work, they use anecdata. now, how do you interact with those people?

or do you care more about getting all self-righteous and angry?

. at a certain point with the effectiveness of vaccines, the adverse effects actually start to outnumber the people still being effected

Source for that?

> but at this very point what does it matter to the parents if they have just as much chance to hurt their child either way?

It is not the same chance, not for a mile

There is absolutely no convincing these people. None. You are as likely to convince a devote islamic extremist to convert to christianity. I'm not saying you should insult people - just saying it won't change their mind.
I don't know. I mean, I know civility and all that. But those people are putting other people's lives at risk --not their own, so much. I think that kind of egregiously selfish behavior pretty much deserves harsh repudiation.
Using the word "retard" has no effect on your targets. But it does effect people with a learning disability who are a group that is marginalised, stigmatised, and discriminated against.

There are a bunch of other words you could use: "idiots" fits nicely.

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin ... And anti-vaccine folks are not ignorant, they are way more dangerous than that.
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Lets just say that the relationship is purely corrupt. How does that justify not immunising your children and endangering other peoples children? This argument is bogus, and you've helped to clearly demonstrate the quote above at work.
It's almost the same a saying that it's better to have no information than to have incorrect information.
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> Even the CDC has admitted it excluded the data showing that the chance of autism from vaccination increases based on the race of the children being injected.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cdcwhistleblower.asp

> So keep using slurs to bash those who prefer to act in their own self interest rather than discussing the real facts.

Would you like to discuss some more "real facts?" I'm happy to oblige.

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"As the CDC noted, the authors of that study suggested the most likely explanation for the moderate correlation between autism and vaccination in young children was the existence of immunization requirements for autistic children enrolled in special education preschool programs."

Read more at http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cdcwhistleblower.asp#d...

The Snopes article has you out-experted. Moreover, it fits with all the other studies ever done.

What about the immediately following paragraph from said author?

"I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits."

I don't disagree that disclosing the full set of information is usually better, but it can be problematic to include every bit of data and attempt to justify everything, particularly in the rat race that is funding for research.

I think you don't understand science. You choose to believe one unpublished bit of gossip about a unpublished study on one segment of the population (which happened to disappear when the study was done a slightly different way), but you ignore the overwhelming evidence that vaccines have nothing to do with autism?

Yes, idiots is a good word for these people. All the evidence shows that vaccines do a hell of a lot more good than harm, yet the continue to believe in shitty science and conspiracy theories.

shouldn't insurance decline to pay for treatment of a disease when parents willfully declined vaccination? After all it is a completely irresponsible inviting of the problem just like driving while drunk.
That would only result in their children suffering.
And a reminder to adults, you should be following the CDC recommended vaccine schedule for yourself too:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/adult.htm...

At least in the US, these are available in most states at the pharmacy and are usually covered by insurance. Pertussis in particular is a leading vaccine preventable cause of death worldwide. So at least be up to date on your Tdap.

I get that you're talking about people today, but we need to understand how the "MMR causes autism" sham started and propagated in order to prevent it happening again.

Most people who did not vaccinate their children were getting mixed messages from the media. A lot of English newspaper coverage was very unclear and there was plenty that was campaigning against MMR and for individual vaccinations.

You know that science understanding in the feneral population is low. You know that science reporting, even from reputable media outlets, is piss poor.

There's an extra factor here. Science reporting is terrible and that includes when the reporter has access to honest researchers telling the truth and a unified story. In the MMR case they had a crooked researcher telling them lies.

Andrew Wakefield had developed a single measles vaccine. For that to be sucessful he needed to stop people using the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield was hired as an expert witness in a law case to prove that there was a causal link between MMR and disease. He was paid over £400,000 - and those are 1990s pounds.

His deceitful paper was published (although later retracted) in a well known respected peer-reviewed journal. Newspaper gave it coverage as a credible paper.

http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

It's not that surprising to see people react in the way they did in the face of this determined crookery.

Seriously? This bullshit source is what you use to call this article bullshit? This website's tagline is literally "psychopaths rule our world."

The topics have a section for "science of the spirit" and there's a blog post on the front page that keeps theme with the about page representing this site as a group fighting to be heard over the scientists who are repressing them.

PS. Your link's article isn't even talking about the same thing as the original article. Thought you might want to know before reading it yourself.

Original article is actual news about measles outbreak. Yours is about chickenpox from a shady resource. I fail to see how your input is relevant to the discussion.
Clearly you have no idea what "attenuated vaccines" are.
It is important to make sure that kids get vaccines ASAP to reduce the risk of exposing them to these kinds of health treats. Unfortunately, some foreign governments do not give priority to providing families wiht free vaccines and whatnot.