Let’s pile it on
Dunno about you, but I have a depressed area on my upper left arm. Bet most of you fellow old farts do, too. It’s those damn vaccinations! The smallpox vaccine created a small reaction within the recipient’s body which showed their body was immunized and that the vaccine was working. Good thing, too, because other than giving you prominent facial scarring it killed about 30% of those who contracted it. Effective, too – smallpox has been eradicated in this country officially since the 1980s.
So was measles.
But we have an outbreak going in Texas. And Kansas. And Ohio. And New Mexico. Why? Unvaccinated folks contracting it and passing it along.
While most people’s symptoms improve, about 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized. About 1 out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop brain swelling that can lead to brain damage, and up to 3 of every 1,000 children who become infected will die, the CDC says.
Easy solution – the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) has been protecting adults and kids for decades. But…anti-vaccination folks (anti-vaxxers) claim vaccines damage kids. Their evidence is anecdotal, barely above “I heard at the bar that a trucker saw something really similar when he was on the road somewhere.” You get the idea.
A lot of this got superheated during the Covid pandemic. mRNA vaccines hit the news (ten years after they had been started in use, but that doesn’t matter now) and hyped as having all kinds of severe side effects. Legit, too…thousands of them…out of the millions and millions of shots administered. But if you think you’re gonna get a million to one hit, don’t get one. I get it.
And then we have the gold standard – “Mercury in vaccines causes autism”.
Despite a mountain of scientific evidence concluding there’s no link between autism and vaccines, noted anti-vaccine figure and health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. is trying to double down on the long-debunked theory.
As the Washington Post reports, fellow anti-vaccine crackpot David Geier — who has published articles claiming that mercury in vaccines is tied to autism, and was previously reprimanded by state authorities in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license — is joining Kennedy’s department as a “senior data analyst” to work on a study once again examining the topic of autism and vaccines.
Remember during the Covid epidemic when folks advocated masking and said “follow the science” – and refused to LOOK at the science that said the virus was so small that a mask wouldn’t stop it? (The best analogy was ‘trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence’ as I recall.) Well, the real science said (way back in 2004, during the Bush administration) that the “mercury in vaccines” line was pure BS. And we are trying to hire its biggest advocate?
“To me, the big shame is that with budget cuts, we are not ramping up research into what is actually causing autism,” former head of the Washington office of the CDC Edward Hunter told the NYT. “And if you are worried about vaccine-preventable disease, this is such a clear setback.” Futurism
Kennedy was a poor choice for health secretary then (and now) due to his crackpot anti-vaxxer stance. Doubling down on that? Just plain stupid.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", None
