Science Deniers Open new Front as Anti-Vaxxers Push Agenda
How did we get here? and how far down this rabbit hole do we go?
In the background I’m listening to the idiot banter on Fox News actually debating the merits of vaccinating children. Incredibly, because the President urged parents to get kids their shots, science denial crowd has gone off their meds.
The unfolding controversy threatens to turn vaccinations into an election issue. The Huffington Post quickly rounded up the rest of the potential GOP contenders’ positions on vaccines. And the New York Times reported that the debate is posing a challenge for Republican candidates, “who find themselves in the familiar but uncomfortable position of reconciling modern science with the skepticism of their core conservative voters,” similarly to issues related to climate change.
But making measles into election fodder comes with some risks. Medical experts are wary about the recent vaccine controversy stemming from potential presidential contenders. They say that approaching vaccine safety as if there are two equal sides to the debate gives anti-science conspiracies too much credibility.
“When you see educated people or elected officials giving credence to things that have been completely debunked, an idea that’s been shown to be responsible for multiple measles and pertussis outbreaks in recent years, it’s very concerning,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Washington Post.
President Barack Obama urged American parents to get their children fully vaccinated on Sunday, amid growing concerns over an outbreak of measles, a highly contagious airborne disease, in the western United States.
“I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations,” Obama said in a pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on Sunday. “The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”
“I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines,” Paul said.
CNBC host Kelly Evans asked Paul, a potential 2016 candidate, about his previous statement that vaccines “ought to be voluntary,” and he seemed confused as to why his statement was controversial.
“Co-host Andrea Tantaros agreed that it was a “tough” issue, but she was more concerned about the now-debunked links between vaccines and autism.”
Gov. Chris Christie’s comments today over whether children should be vaccinated sparked a wave of reaction across the web.
Christie, a potential candidate for the Republican nomination for president, told reporters during a trade mission to England that “parents need to have some measure of choice” on whether their children are immunized. Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for the governor’s office, clarified Christie’s position, saying “the governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”
When the anti science movement started in this country, with industries deliberately introducing bad faith disinformation into public debates, I’m sure they weren’t thinking beyond their immediate economic advantage, measured in months, or a few years, and limited to their own particular area of interest. But the technique has spread, from lead, to tobacco, to acid rain, to climate change. Decades of misinformation and slander against legitimate science, and continued attacks on science education, have left us vulnerable to increasingly destructive decay of the fundamental compacts of civilization and enlightenment.
We understand now that by repeating false talking points, even to refute them, we often merely add force to antiscience memes.
And now, a small group of fanatics has actually managed, it seems, to introduce children’s vaccinations, one of the pillars of the modern system of public health, into a public debate in an extremely destructive way.
Thanks, Lead, tobacco, oil, and coal industries, and btw, Fox News. This is where it leads. We’re on our way back to the middle ages.
Below, an earlier video chronicles the persecution of climate scientists by the fossil fuel whipped ignorance of Marc Morano and other leading science deniers.
15 thoughts on “Science Deniers Open new Front as Anti-Vaxxers Push Agenda”
The Repugnant 2016 Clown Bus careens madly down the road as the occupants change seats and pander to the base (that isn’t big enough to get them elected in the “big game”). And when Christie changes his seat, that REALLY moves the center of gravity—-can we hope it will soon tip over?. (It doesn’t matter where Perry sits—-he is too “light weight” to matter).
I have SEEN WITH MY OWN EYES “many tragic cases of walking, talking normal adults who wound up with profound mental disorders” after swallowing too much horseshit from AGW deniers, Repugnant politicians, and conservatives of any kind in any setting. What we need is a “liberal-progressive vaccine” (LPV) to administer to the “profoundly mentally disordered” and cure them—-A Nobel Prize awaits!
Look on the bright side, if fewer Republicans get vaccinated, then the gene pool will improve after the next pandemic and their chance of getting reelected would decrease.
If Obama would do a dental hygeine campaign, Repubs’ teeth would fall out in a few months!
I suggest giving all these anti-vaxxers their own state they can move to and after some years, that problem has been taken care of by evolution. As long as peoples bad behaviour only affect themselves let them do it, after all that’s why we have the Darwin awards. But the sad fact, like climate change, not vaccinating your kids risks people who cannot take the vaccine due to other reasons or indeed infants who are not old enough to take some of these vaccines. So by all means, go ahead and kill your own kids, but if you dare try to kill mine, you’d better think twice.
It’s a sad state of affairs when so many people have left science completely because they feel their own “faith” is a better explanation – and that includes any kind of faith they have that is obstructing any real progress in solving our planets problems.
What would happen if childhood vaccination (+antibiotics) went away, is that people would start having larger numbers of children, just so 2 could make it to adulthood. Women would drop out of the workforce in larger numbers to become baby factories. And they’d rationalize the larger childhood death rates as acts of God or the Devil, or eventually….witches.
Plus of course many of those women would die at childbirth, making education of girls a mostly pointless time wasting exercise and convincing men and women alike to believe female lives be almost completely worthless.
This would increase the child and maternal mortality rates even further. It’ll be a worldwide Afghanistan.
Spout non sequiturs much, Omno? There is NO (repeat NO) connection between vaccinations and maternal mortality at childbirth. There is also little connection between maternal mortality at childbirth and antibiotics. Women had been giving birth for a looooooooooooong time before antibiotics came along 75 years ago, and hand washing turned out to be the biggest factor in maternal mortality. Look up “puerperal fever” and Semmelweis.
Why Omno makes such irrelevant, ignorant, grandiose, and pompous statements such as these is beyond me.
….”making education of girls a mostly pointless time wasting exercise and convincing men and women alike to believe female lives be almost completely worthless” and “It’ll be a worldwide Afghanistan”.
Lord love a duck and JFC, but the overreach there is mind-boggling. Does Omno need the attention that badly?
Time resurrect a history lesson from the American Civil War. One of the major causes of death among Southern troops was the fact that many of them had been brought up in isolated rural communities and had never contracted childhood diseases. When they were exposed to measles and other diseases in unsanitary camps, they died– maybe more than had been killed by Federal bullets.
We’re now creating another pool of people who were never exposed to childhood diseases and are unprotected from vaccinations. Will we get a repeat of the Civil War experience?
2009? FIVE years ago? What has huffpo said lately about the issue? And we’ve elevated it to the nature of a TRAGEDY now? And what “tragedy” that’s “not Republican” are we speaking of anyway? Seems to me that the Repugnants can be blamed for most of the real “tragedies” we face in
America today. (Omno wouldn’t understand, since he doesn’t understand America)
Again, Omno will spout any kind of nonsense to get attention. Then he will whine that we are “bullying” him when we give it to him. Go figure.
Whine, whine, whine. Omno actually loves the attention and craves more, hence this comment of his that begs for it.
And “….there are CHILDREN at risk here!!!!!”? Such drama!
And “low-lifer”? I have never been insulted so eloquently!
The whole freakin’ planet is at risk, Omno, and you do nothing to help the world understand that or deal with it. In fact, you get in the way of increased “understanding” whenever you comment on a topic.
“Go comment something else” (?) (sic) yourself. Better yet, just go away.
Good old Omno! In his quest for attention, any kind of attention, he cites the freaking Free Beacon, one of the crazier sites in the right wing blogosphere, and would have us make something out of the alleged “details” there.
There is no doubt that the loonies on the far left have been wrong about vaccination, and they and the looney libertarians on the far right have gone so far to the respective fringes that they have completed the circle and are standing side-by-side on this topic. Omno understands none of that, unfortunately.
I am trying to ignore your comments as you requested, Omno, but you are making it very hard. The willful ignorance and functional illiteracy you display about so many topics in your maunderings are an insult to our intelligence, and as educator I just can’t let them slide.
“What a difference a year makes” (or 5 in this case), goes the song. Will Omno see the error of his ways in 5 years and become Crock’s “voice of reason”? We can hope.
The Repugnant 2016 Clown Bus careens madly down the road as the occupants change seats and pander to the base (that isn’t big enough to get them elected in the “big game”). And when Christie changes his seat, that REALLY moves the center of gravity—-can we hope it will soon tip over?. (It doesn’t matter where Perry sits—-he is too “light weight” to matter).
I have SEEN WITH MY OWN EYES “many tragic cases of walking, talking normal adults who wound up with profound mental disorders” after swallowing too much horseshit from AGW deniers, Repugnant politicians, and conservatives of any kind in any setting. What we need is a “liberal-progressive vaccine” (LPV) to administer to the “profoundly mentally disordered” and cure them—-A Nobel Prize awaits!
Look on the bright side, if fewer Republicans get vaccinated, then the gene pool will improve after the next pandemic and their chance of getting reelected would decrease.
If Obama would do a dental hygeine campaign, Repubs’ teeth would fall out in a few months!
I suggest giving all these anti-vaxxers their own state they can move to and after some years, that problem has been taken care of by evolution. As long as peoples bad behaviour only affect themselves let them do it, after all that’s why we have the Darwin awards. But the sad fact, like climate change, not vaccinating your kids risks people who cannot take the vaccine due to other reasons or indeed infants who are not old enough to take some of these vaccines. So by all means, go ahead and kill your own kids, but if you dare try to kill mine, you’d better think twice.
It’s a sad state of affairs when so many people have left science completely because they feel their own “faith” is a better explanation – and that includes any kind of faith they have that is obstructing any real progress in solving our planets problems.
What would happen if childhood vaccination (+antibiotics) went away, is that people would start having larger numbers of children, just so 2 could make it to adulthood. Women would drop out of the workforce in larger numbers to become baby factories. And they’d rationalize the larger childhood death rates as acts of God or the Devil, or eventually….witches.
http://youtu.be/RSwZJ55g80Q
Plus of course many of those women would die at childbirth, making education of girls a mostly pointless time wasting exercise and convincing men and women alike to believe female lives be almost completely worthless.
This would increase the child and maternal mortality rates even further. It’ll be a worldwide Afghanistan.
Spout non sequiturs much, Omno? There is NO (repeat NO) connection between vaccinations and maternal mortality at childbirth. There is also little connection between maternal mortality at childbirth and antibiotics. Women had been giving birth for a looooooooooooong time before antibiotics came along 75 years ago, and hand washing turned out to be the biggest factor in maternal mortality. Look up “puerperal fever” and Semmelweis.
Why Omno makes such irrelevant, ignorant, grandiose, and pompous statements such as these is beyond me.
….”making education of girls a mostly pointless time wasting exercise and convincing men and women alike to believe female lives be almost completely worthless” and “It’ll be a worldwide Afghanistan”.
Lord love a duck and JFC, but the overreach there is mind-boggling. Does Omno need the attention that badly?
Time resurrect a history lesson from the American Civil War. One of the major causes of death among Southern troops was the fact that many of them had been brought up in isolated rural communities and had never contracted childhood diseases. When they were exposed to measles and other diseases in unsanitary camps, they died– maybe more than had been killed by Federal bullets.
We’re now creating another pool of people who were never exposed to childhood diseases and are unprotected from vaccinations. Will we get a repeat of the Civil War experience?
This tragedy isn’t new, and it’s not Republican in character
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/01/what-to-do-about-huffpo/
2009? FIVE years ago? What has huffpo said lately about the issue? And we’ve elevated it to the nature of a TRAGEDY now? And what “tragedy” that’s “not Republican” are we speaking of anyway? Seems to me that the Repugnants can be blamed for most of the real “tragedies” we face in
America today. (Omno wouldn’t understand, since he doesn’t understand America)
Again, Omno will spout any kind of nonsense to get attention. Then he will whine that we are “bullying” him when we give it to him. Go figure.
Dumbo you low lifer there are children at risk here and all you contribute is the usual anti-me bullying, go comment something else.
Whine, whine, whine. Omno actually loves the attention and craves more, hence this comment of his that begs for it.
And “….there are CHILDREN at risk here!!!!!”? Such drama!
And “low-lifer”? I have never been insulted so eloquently!
The whole freakin’ planet is at risk, Omno, and you do nothing to help the world understand that or deal with it. In fact, you get in the way of increased “understanding” whenever you comment on a topic.
“Go comment something else” (?) (sic) yourself. Better yet, just go away.
More details
http://freebeacon.com/issues/trial-lawyers-and-dem-donors-support-anti-vaccination-movement/
Good old Omno! In his quest for attention, any kind of attention, he cites the freaking Free Beacon, one of the crazier sites in the right wing blogosphere, and would have us make something out of the alleged “details” there.
There is no doubt that the loonies on the far left have been wrong about vaccination, and they and the looney libertarians on the far right have gone so far to the respective fringes that they have completed the circle and are standing side-by-side on this topic. Omno understands none of that, unfortunately.
I am trying to ignore your comments as you requested, Omno, but you are making it very hard. The willful ignorance and functional illiteracy you display about so many topics in your maunderings are an insult to our intelligence, and as educator I just can’t let them slide.
HuffPo again, this time with the voice of reason
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/03/rand-paul-vaccination_n_6604498.html
“What a difference a year makes” (or 5 in this case), goes the song. Will Omno see the error of his ways in 5 years and become Crock’s “voice of reason”? We can hope.