Hello Neil! What do you think, what does Pestilence do in retirement?
Spends a lot of time on the internet ranting about vaccines.
Tag: vaccinate your kids
I love how the title and thumbnail lure in the anti-vaxxers.
I wish I could see their reaction when he reveals what the “side effects” are.
I don’t think you can make risk analysis any simpler than this video.
Vaccinating your kids is like putting a seatbelt on their immune system.
Not vaccinating them is like saying, “Well, they might get a seatbelt injury if they are in a crash!“
Which is true. But a seatbelt injury is better than the death that comes from not wearing one.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Hey
Psstt
The guy who invented the theory that vaccines cause autism had his medical license revoked for it
thats ridiculous
they took it away because he came up with a seemingly plausible theory?
They took it away because other scientists have been unable to reproduce his results, his results were made up, he didn’t even get approved by an ethics committee, and now he’s risking the health and lives of a whole bunch of people
It’s not just that he came to incorrect conclusions, he falsified data on purpose, apparently because he had patented a related medical test and stood to make a lot of money off people using his test instead of vaccinating.
It’s crazy how this one person, in a study of only twelve children, gained so much traction in the world. He put this lie out there—and it was a lie, not just interpreting data incorrectly—and now it doesn’t even matter that he’s been proven totally false. Years of effort to reestablish the truth can’t undo the lie once it’s out there in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people believe that lie, and actual children are getting sick and dying because of it.
This is a really troubling aspect of how human minds work, and it’s something conservative politicians take advantage of on a regular basis. If you just say that “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does“ is provide abortions, it doesn’t matter how often people recite the objective truth that abortions are a tiny fraction of Planned Parenthood services. You can say the truth 1000 times for every one time the lie is repeated, and thousands of people will still trust the lie.
I’d never heard this before, and it’s actually really helpful information to have, so thanks. Here is a scientific article by the American Academy of Pediatrics explaining the flaws in Wakefield’s research and briefly summarizing four studies that refuted the fraudulent claims. Here is an article by the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal calling him a fraud in no uncertain terms. Here is the first part of a nine-part investigative journalistic series, published in the BMJ, uncovering his fraud. And the General Medical Council conclusions that stripped Wakefield of his clinical credentials can be found here.
I’m honestly so mad right now reading about this guy. People are dying of measles right now because vaccinations fell off so sharply, and those deaths can be laid at the door of this man.
When the apocalypse comes, pestilence will ride wearing Wakefield’s face
Getting a vaccine is pretty badass because you beat the life out of a virus and then you absorb it so you can kill its friends easier
So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)
I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.
Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4414081 (can’t hyperlink because I’m on mobile, apologies)
It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century – that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so – in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.
Polio still thrives in a lot of countries, including India. I watched a documentary about it Netflix. The disease runs rampant in well-developed countries, and with more people traveling around the world there is more exposure to this and many other diseases. When polio survivors in India were interviewed and asked about the anti-vaccination movement in the USA they had this look of total disgust and shock. Idiot anti-vaxxers are placing a death sentence on their children, would rather they die or have permanent scars and disabilities, would rather listen to lies about vaccinations causing autism.
We had a big round of whooping cough tear through this tiny town I live in. Children DIED because they were too young for the vaccination. The people who caused this, the carriers, are anti-vaxxers. No idea what happened to them. One child died because the coughing broke a rib and damaged their lungs.
Some polio survivors have had to live in an iron lung their entire lives because the vaccination wasn’t readily available. Now the vaccine is and it’s fools and idiots sentencing the most vulnerable to a painful death because of ignorance.