WA measles outbreak likely originated in Bible study class

[Lemon Drop]

timg wrote:
So, your statement is from personal experience then. That's fine, just say that.

Just curious - do you know any communities of color who fit the demographic in the article?

Yes, of course I know of wealthy, well-educated non-white communities. None are anti-vaxxer clusters.

If you can find any non-white anti-vaxxer communities I'd be really interested in that. If you can show that the vast majority of people following that movement are not white, I'll be surprised. Interested, but surprised. Because there's plenty of evidence beyond "my personal experience" to show that

Also this is a weird thing to argue about and without a doubt the very least important thing about this issue.

[testcase]

Months ago, I picked up a DVD at my library. The topic was vaccine safety. There was a Medical Doctor in Great Britain (I don't remember his name now) who had compelling evidence that certain COMBINED vaccines were harmful to far more children than the government and pharmaceutical companies would admit to. I remember the MMP (mumps, measles and I think whooping cough?) when combined (a common practice) was causing more than a few serious complications (and, when given SEPARATELY over time, the incidence of complications was almost nil). The medical and especially Big Pharma communities went after this MD causing him all sorts of grief. BIG anything generally viciously attacks anyone who has the temerity to question them. Smear campaigns and hostile acts up to and including murder are NOT beyond BIG ______ (you fill in the blank. We're talking BILLIONS of dollars at stake). Years to decades later, information surfaces that tobacco, talcum powder, asbestos, high fructose corn syrup, GMOs, pesticides etc, etc, etc are NOT the benign, beneficial products their creators want the public to believe they are (and ARE known to the corporate elite to be harmful VERY early on).

I've read that Jenny McCarthy blames the MMP combined vaccine for her child's autism. I SURE that all the drugs / substances Jenny may or may not have used in her party girl days had NOTHING to do with her eggs being scrambled. I, for one, wonder just how much harm has been done to unsuspecting youthful users when drug use exploded as a recreational activity. In today's "if it feels good do it" (and hell, the government might even pay for it!) society, personal responsibility is largely MIA. It's MUCH easier to blame someone, anyone else and, when anyone is TRULY caught, it somehow is never their fault.

[JoeH]

That MD turned out to A. have an interest in a competing vaccine, and B. made up his data. For those reasons and others his license to practice was revoked years ago. But people keep trotting him out as an expert and cite his bogus data to support their anti vaccine agenda.

[Sarcany]

testcase wrote:
Months ago, I picked up a DVD at my library. The topic was vaccine safety. There was a Medical Doctor in Great Britain (I don't remember his name now) who had compelling evidence that certain COMBINED vaccines were harmful to far more children than the government and pharmaceutical companies would admit to...

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/aut...index.html

Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds

January 5, 2011 8:14 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. "Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work...

Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them. Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers -- a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. After years on controversy, the Lancet, the prestigious journal that originally published the research, retracted Wakefield's paper last February.

The series of articles launched Wednesday are investigative journalism, not results of a clinical study. The writer, Brian Deer, said Wakefield "chiseled" the data before him, "falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare." ...

There's much more like that. The Wikipedia article does a good job with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

[Janit]

Lemon Drop wrote:
[quote=Acer]
I agree with testcase. Anti-vax is not racist elitism. It's ill-informed stupidity.

It's all of the above, and more.

Anti-vaxxers are nearly always white, affluent, well-educated parents. You do not find clusters of poor minority parents letting their kids go without vaccines. Those people would expect to be punished for doing that.

Anti-vaxxers know their children are protected by herd immunity and by previous efforts to eradicate diseases. But getting shots is for other people; they want their kids to be "pure" and they live in such privilege bubbles that they don't accept responsibility for how their behavior endangers not only their own child but society in general.

You might think this crowd is mostly crunchy granola ultra left types, but there are just as many Republican anti-vaxxers as Democrats - it's not really a political thing.

I am all for continued research into the safety of vaccines, of course. But some things we know for sure: if this trend of not vaccinating children continues, people will suffer and die unnecessarily.

Here's a good article on who they are and why they reject the core advice of pediatricians and public health officials:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/who-a...ti-vaxxers

"The biggest camp by far are the highly educated, mainstream upper-class people who don't reject modern medicine, who go to the doctor, but have gotten on this theme of distrust of the information that's being provided by doctors about vaccines," Sawyer said.
There is also a bit of taking a free ride in this. The anti-vaxxers reap the benefit of herd immunity while avoiding any of the real or imagined risks of vaccination. Of course, when too many people try to ride for free, the whole cart starts to fall apart.

[Lux Interior]

testcase wrote:
Months ago, I picked up a

big dose of confirmation bias.

[deckeda]

Well, unless there’s a “compelling” DVD available at the local library, how would anyone know the truth?

Some of us enjoy being so fearful, we blame not only the Big corporations who make us sick, but also the victims who get sick as a result, and then incoherently blurt it all out online.

For example I’m still “upset” at how all food crops became —- literally —- GMOs hundreds or thousands of years ago, and people die every year. Coincidence? I think not.

[Sarcany]

deckeda wrote:
For example I’m still “upset” at how all food crops became —- literally —- GMOs hundreds or thousands of years ago, and people die every year. Coincidence? I think not.

OMG! You are so right!

For all the vaunted health benefits, broccoli is really an unlabeled GMO.

And people have been eating it for centuries!! Many of those people are dead now!!

[rjmacs]

I said resonance. I guess I could have called it a weird coincidence. But that seems to defy logic more than resonance.



I guess anti-vaxxing bias is just a condition that predominantly affect white people, but it has nothing to do with race.

[$tevie]

A major difference between monied white anti-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers within poor and working class communities of color is the differential access to medical care in the event that their unvaccinated children do get sick. This is particularly the case now that the Republican-dominated government is attempting to eliminate Medicaid, which would reduce access to state-run health services for children.

There are a few reasons why the likes of Kennedy might recruit the Nation to his anti-vaxxing cause: well-founded Black fears of western biomedicine and scientific racism legitimize the claims of white anti-vaxxers whose unreliable empirics allow the majority of people to perceive them as a somewhat fringe and easily dismissible group.

There are also convergences in the anti-vaccine and conservative pro-life politics of the likes Kennedy and Louis Farrakhan rooted in discourses around the rights and safety of racialized children. It is the same line of thought that holds the myth that Planned Parenthood clinics were created to control Black populations that also holds that vaccines are poisonous and deliberately destroying the potential of young Black men by giving them autism and other development disorders.

http://blackyouthproject.com/need-talk-a...mmunities/

I don't personally know any Black anti-vaxxers, but I have Black Friends on FB who have Black friends who are staunchly anti-vaccination and not afraid to jump on threads to say so.