So, my an online american friend said"My mom didn’t want to vaccine vax cuzs autism". Is he joking? I know many people say thing like that but i thought they all were joking?
In my country which is a third world country no one believe shit like that even my Grand mother who is illiterate and religious don’t believe thing like that and knows the benefit of vaccine.
One of my family, and former nurse, is against at least mRNA vaccines, but she also fell down the far right conspiracy theory rabbithole so…
This started in the UK in the 90s with a research paper by Andrew Wakefield linking MMR (measle mumps rubella) vaccines to autism. It was trash research but it for published in the Lancet (a major international journal) before being retracted once other doctors pointed out the massive flaws in the research.
There was and is no evidence of causation - autism happens to be diagnosed usually after childhood vaccines are conpleted but thats because vaccines are mostly in young ages and it takes a while for autism to be diagnosable as its only obvious once children reach a certain age when the socialization aspects of the diseases become more obviously.
However despite it being trash research and eventually being withdrawn, the damage was done. Enough parents of children with autism wanted to believe that this disease was inflicted upon them and have someone to blame rather than accept it is largely genetic and bad luck. A perhaps understandable feeling but that gave an opening for conspiracy theorists to blame the government for a “cover up” even though all the counter evidence and push pack is evidence based and freely unavailable.
Andrew Wakefield eventually got struck off the UK medical register - he was found to have had undisclosed financial interests that would make him millions in selling bogus test kits. The real conspiracy was his but Hes managed to move to the US and make a career as a “victim” and “outsider” to the pharmacy industry.
This whole vaccine conspiracy has been taken up with the US right wing and religious groups. Its a perfect conspiracy for them as it plays into the ideas of the US federal “forcing” then to do things against their will. In this case vaccinating children (which depends on a majority of children getting vaccinated to protect the whole population - herd immunity) and is used as an example of “socialism” vs their preferred extreme individualism. They already rail against being told they cannot indoctrinate children by lying about science in schools (trying to suppress evolution teaching etc) or use the states infrastructure to discriminate against groups they disagree with such as gay or trans people, or be downright racist asis often seen throughout the bible belt.
So the vaccine conspiracy theory is basically one of many tools used by the right wing and religious allies to rail against supposed state interference in their lives. Instead most people who believe in this nonsense are either extremely ignorant and easily manipulated or deliberately using the nonsense to further their own goals. So some of these people are highly intelligent and don’t care whether this is true or false - only that it aligns with their world view and goals so they dont challenge it. Some will even know its all bullshit and go along with it to further their own goals.
The covid vaccines has supercharged this debate. The roll out of vaccines with massively reduced testing and safety steps to try and control the pandemic, and then the side effects seen has all helped fuel this conspiracy and grow it within the right wing echo chamber.
There is no evidence whatsoever that vaccination causes autism. However parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated with MMR and now you have outbreaks of diseases like Measles in the US. People will die, people will become infetile - all from a disease that is easily prevented by a vaccine.
Tl:dr: The vaccine conspiracy is a right wing aligned nonsense started in the 90s andnuper charged by covid, and is a sign of the extremely polarised and disinformation heavy nature of right wing US politics (and is seen in other western countries if you dig into it even if fringe stuff)
He may not be joking. My family and people I interact with don’t think vaccinations cause autism. I’m happy to have never experienced or known of anyone getting measles, polio or other ailments most everyone my age have been protected from thanks to vaccines.
Sadly some here believe the lies spread by those who for some bizarre reason are against vaccines. There’s a measles outbreak right now in Texas and New Mexico that’s affecting around 99 people so far. Last year across the US there were 285 cases. Before the fairly recent anti-vaccination crowd formed measles were officially eradicated in 2000.
Now our country’s health leader, RFK (aka worm brain), is one of the assholes against vaccinations. Sad time for sure but we’re not all like this.
Yes, there are genuine idiots in this country that are against vaccination.
There are also a plethora of foreign idiots and trolls spreading misinformation about everything including stances on vaccination. Judging by the quotation you shared it’s impossible to tell if that is an actual person’s thought, though, because it is not written in English.
Back in the 90s a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield was bribed by a pharmaceutical company that made separate vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella to come up with a study to discredit the combined mmr vaccine. He found a bunch of parents in an antivax society and twisted the results of a very weighted questionnaire to demonstrate a link between MMR and the 'tism. It was quickly discredited, but the damage was done. He was stripped of his medical licence after that.
Hbomb’s video is a good overview if you have about two hours to spare.
For the paper he published - he got his subjects at a birthday party. Not all of them even had autism. He was positing that autism had something to do with the digestive track, and they did shit like lumbar punctures on some of the kids (one iirc had serious complications - they basically tortured autistic children with a bunch of painful and complicated medical tests).
The fact that The Lancet published a paper with such horrific failures in methodology, ethics, and even fucking sample size is an embarrassment.
There’s a number of points this comment misses. First, it wasn’t pharmaceutical companies, but moms group of autistic children that approached him.
[I]n 1995, while conducting research into Crohn’s disease, he was approached by Rosemary Kessick, the parent of a child with autism, who was seeking help with her son’s bowel problems and autism; Kessick ran a group called Allergy Induced Autism. In 1996, Wakefield turned his attention to researching possible connections between the MMR vaccine and autism.
And the time, he was still a well regarded scientist and doctor:
At the time of his MMR research study, Wakefield was senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine
This was also published in 1998 in The Lancet an important medical journal, but the controversy didn’t start with this publication, but his press conference after the publication where he did advocate for single vaccines and not a combined MMR. Pretty poor form and highly criticized at the time.
The media took this and ran with it. It caused wide spread misinformation about autism and the MMR vaccine. But it was also a media outlet that began to tear apart the claims in 2004.
It wasn’t retracted until 2010 and a full write up about what went wrong in the BMJ in 2011. There was a lot of criticism before then, but I was also highly cited as well.
There’s a lot of lessons to be learned here and that is best done with the full story.
Don’t forget Oprah Winfrey giving
MelissaJenny McCarthy a mouthpiece in front of every suburban mom in the US. We have her to thank for both that and “Dr” Phil.If I recall correctly that was Jenny McCarthy, but correct otherwise (not looking to see Melissa McCarthy take the flak for that!). The amount of ugly pseudoscience and bullshit that has emerged through Oprah’s platform is horrifying.
oh FFS I mixed up names, will fix it
It’s crazy to think about the thousands of lost lives stemming from a single fraudulent study.
It makes me sad that the piece of shit Andrew Wakefield is still alive while so many better people than him have died for his bullshit.
We very, very much wish it were just a joke. Diseases that were basically eliminated in the US are making a comeback. And we just appointed an antivaxxer as our health secretary, who also has proposed sending people on antidepressants and ADHD drugs to work camps for years to “re-parent” them.
It’s fucking terrifying here right now, at least for anyone paying attention.
antidepressants and ADHD drugs to work camps for years to “re-parent” them.
… WTF. I hope that mfr get squashed to death.
anti vaxxing is a thing that real people really engage in, they are in fact, stupid. But it is unfortunately real, just look into the resurgence in measles outbreaks and TB and shit, that’s why.
ur friend very well may be joking, but i can assure it’s not a complete meme.
If this is the case, try to convince your friend to talk to their doctor about vaccinations. They may decide, for themselves, that they’re comfortable with it.
If people were smart enough to listen to informed opinions, and listen to facts, they wouldnt have become antivax in the first place.
We’re talking about the child of anti-vaccine parents, OP’s friend didn’t say they were anti-vaccine, they said that their parents were so they were not vaccinated as a child.
So, as a friend, OP should try to convince his friend to talk to a doctor about it. People like that are often sheltered from conflicting opinions and may still be reachable.
Some anti-vax people I know personally are my boss, 2 of the office trolls, the guy in the garage, the stinky guy who sits next to me, my friend’s mom, etc etc. People are fucking stupid yo.
Mostly the right-wing leaning Americans, who don’t like anything that costs them money even if it contributes towards a better society. They say they hate Socialism in all its forms, but had absolutely no problem accepting stimulus handouts. They are the pure leeches of our country.
Left-wing leaning Americans tend to believe science even if it comes as a slight inconvenience to themselves, that includes things that sometimes cost them money.
This is an oversimplification. I have met plenty of people who are progressive or Democrat that believe some pretty wild things about vaccines and western medicine in general. Don’t underestimate hippies.
Yeah, the whole thing first took hold in left-leaning crunchy all-natural circles.
Nah, the roots of anti-vax was conservative conspiracy nuts from the moment they were a thing.
It did spread to the granola types but it’s older than their existence.
Yes, they do believe it.
In my country which is a third world country no one believe shit like that even my Grand mother who is illiterate and religious don’t believe thing like that and knows the benefit of vaccine
That is because your country has recent, relevant experience with the efficacy of vaccines.
US citizens have been so coddled for so long by being an economic superpower and having access to medications and medical procedures that others do not that those who remember are beginning to pass from old age. This means an entirely new, always coddled generation literally does not know from experience how bad things can get without it. Due to that, and due to American obsession with “free speech” lies and misinformation have flourished, and made people believe that these things are dangerous instead of lifesaving.
Further, it’s tied in with how US citizens feel about being “different.” We live in a wild cult of individuality where everyone knows that if you’re actually really different that things can go sideways for you fast. They’d rather not risk a child being “different” and having autism, and they genuinely don’t understand that they’re choosing to risk death of their child instead. You can be different, just so long as you’re exactly like everybody else!
Our education system is so broken, and our people are so fucking coddled, that they have the opportunity to pretend that these things don’t matter. It’s literally children tearing down things they don’t like because they don’t understand.
These are those “weak mean that create hard times.” Which is infuriating because anti-vaxxers and their ilk are the people who peddle that kind of bullshit ass saying the most, erroneously thinking they’re the “strong men” because they’re “willing to stand up to the man.” In this case, “the man,” being anyone with an education. Notice they don’t hate a rich idiot like Trump who does not care for them, but they hate intellectuals “in their ivory towers” (cough academia).
Yes, a society can be so coddled that the stupid resent the intelligent and educated to the point where they reject everything they say. They think they are fighting tyranny because they have convinced themselves we are lying to them to “get one over on them.” It’s absurd because the very people who put those ideas in their heads are the ones trying to get one over on them. Of course, this has been going on in America for long time.
-Isaac Asimov, 1980
I hate that Asimov quote, it makes me sad. We have been on this path so long and never figured it out.
Sagan wrote a lot of stuff that was right on and makes me sad, too.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
*cries in vegan*
I can’t decide if this comment is a vegan crying about being bamboozled into veganism or a vegan crying about others being bamboozled into hating veganism. Hoping it’s the latter.
Every time industrialists come up with a new way to help people lie to themselves about the moral, medical, and environmental consequences of animal consumption, no matter how gossamer the cover, people eat it up. But when the scientific community provides evidence that people can completely avoid T2 diabetes, heart disease, many major forms of cancer, and apparently even Alzheimer’s, it doesn’t move the needle one pip. People would rather lie to themselves and will selectively choose what facts to emotionally and intellectually process and which to pretend they never even heard.
Glad it was indeed the latter. Don’t need vegan bashing here.
Woah. This became the guidebook.
I honestly don’t know if we can. The last decade has really killed a lot of my hope for humanity. I think we’re destined to wipe ourselves out, because so many of us will sit by idly while the rich and powerful destroy our planet for short-term gain.
it’s tied in with how US citizens feel about being “different.”
I want to be different, just like everybody else I want to be like. I want to be just like all of the different people.
-John S Hall, 1992
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
-Margaret Mead
It’s a very real belief, lot of folks here weren’t around to know the “before times” and nothing is ever real until it happens to them.
The real problem isn’t the FO, it’s the lack of empathy until it affects them personally.
They’ve reached the finding out part in Texas.
We are actually that stupid.
Our “leader” is an anti-democratic felon rapist who incited an insurrection and illegally attempted to overturn an election.
It’s not a joke.
Americans are stupid as fuck.
So this happened…
Saw that too. We are a joke.
Oh didn’t saw it I have blocked all news and politics community.
He is not joking and while it is most relevant in the United States it is not exclusive to us.
