A Sense of Doubt blog post #3675 - More People with Measles - THAT ONE THING for 2503.11
I was going to let that visual stand alone, but I decided to share some context.
FROM REBECCA WATSON (video below)
I’ve been talking about measles for about the last 20 years, banging this drum so often that I really debated whether or not I should bother making this video. I went back and looked at some of my old posts, like this one from 2006 when there was a measles outbreak in Boston, where I lived, among the Christian Scientists, a group that believes they can cure all diseases through prayer and homeopathy.
Thanks to a tremendous vaccination effort from the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, measles was eliminated from the United States in the year 2000, meaning there was no continuous transmission for a year. But thanks to one fraud who made up a study two years prior to scare people into not vaccinating their children for measles and buy his own vaccine instead, slowly but surely vaccination rates dropped. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and Oprah Winfrey helped spread Andrew Wakefield’s lie further, and by 2011, measles cases in the US surged past 200. By 2014, there were nearly 700 cases. By 2019, there were more than 1,000.
It’s only March and the US has already seen three outbreaks of measles in different states, with 164 reported cases, and most tragically, one death. A child died because their parents refused to give them a simple, safe, effective vaccine. Most of these cases are in children, and only 2% were fully vaccinated, meaning that they likely didn’t suffer as much.
Meanwhile, the parasitic worm rotting in the brain of our Secretary of Health and Human Services is advocating “unconventional” treatments, as one rag reported: cod oil, which will do fucking nothing to stop more kids from dying. How unconventional! You know what would do something? The safe and effective vaccine, which you can even get after exposure to protect you from measles. The only downside is that it’s pretty conventional, I guess.
It’s infuriating to see everything I’ve been warning about coming to fruition, but that’s just the world right now, right? So why bother making a video about it?
Well, I decided to make this video while I was looking back through my old posts. Back in 2015, I made a video about a new-at-that-time study in PNAS–look I don’t care if the world is on fire, I will never stop loving PNAS–where scientists recruited about 300 people and asked them how they felt about vaccines. Then they sorted them into three groups: one group was shown the facts and evidence proving that vaccines do not cause autism. The second group heard a mother describe the experience of having a child get measles, and they saw photos of children with that disease and others. The third was a control group that got unrelated information.
The group that got the facts hardly differed from the control group when it came to how many changed their opinion. But the group who saw the horrible photos had a massive shift towards viewing vaccines more positively.
The message is simple: we need to scare the shit out of people.
With that in mind, here are some fucking terrifying facts that you might want to share with any friends who might be thinking of skipping vaccination:
Measles is wildly, insanely contagious. One unvaccinated, infected person will spread it to up to 18 others, compared to just two other people for COVID. Before the vaccine was developed, every kid everywhere caught measles, and a shit ton of them died. In the early 20th century, the US lost 6,000 kids every year to measles, with tens of thousands more hospitalized. Developing nations still see a mortality rate of up to 5%. “Not dying” from measles means a week or two of high fever, coughing, and diarrhea, and a chance at seizures, brain inflammation, and blindness. About 60,000 children go blind from measles every year. As a fun bonus, if you aren’t vaccinated, then measles cripples your immune system, meaning that once you recover, you are more at risk of catching every other disease in existence.
And all you have to do to avoid that is to get vaccinated. A safe, effective vaccine.
If you got two doses of the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine) as a kid, there’s a good chance you’re protected for life, as I reported a new study found last year. But if you aren’t sure, you can go to your doctor right now and get tested to see if you are immune. If you aren’t, you can get the MMR. As a bonus, you will then also be protected from rubella, which was reported to have been found in a child in Texas last week but apparently that was just a miscommunication. But hey, why not be safe? After all, we eliminated rubella from the US in 2004, which means it should just be a few years behind measles in its comeback. And hell, we never managed to completely wipe out mumps so that’s a handy vaccine as well. Unless enormous salivary glands come into fashion, I guess.
As I mentioned in that 2015 video, anti-vaxxers tend to be younger than average, because the best way to convince a large number of people to get vaccinated is to expose them to the horrors of the disease the vaccine would eliminate. I’m not sure if that trend will continue into the future, seeing how many people directly experienced the negative effects of COVID, including hospitalization and watching friends and family die, and continue to insist that the vaccine will be killing all of us any day now. The human race may have evolved to be too stupid to even learn from our own recent history, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3540 days ago & DAD = 195 days ago
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