Vaccines

Yes or No?

The Braselton News

Anti-vaxxer movement is not science

Saturday, February 9. 2019

Mike Buffington

The current measles outbreak in Washington state, and several other states, point to a troubling trend in the U.S. where a lot of parents are refusing, or delaying, the vaccination of their children. 

An aggressive anti-vaxxer movement has taken to social media in a bid to undermine the use of vaccinations in this country. (England is also being slammed with the same kind of movement.) 

DYI:  Right from the beginning Mike Huffington fails to include the vaccine court, founded in 1986, - and has awarded over 4 billion in damage claims.  This is either incompetency on his part or simply leaving out the 300 pound gorilla standing in his way of advocating that vaccines are not just safe and effective but vital to mankind’s existence.

Federal vaccine court quietly pays out billions

A chickenpox outbreak at a private school in North Carolina drew extensive national news coverage in November. The thrust of most stories was the public health threat of unvaccinated children and superstitious beliefs about vaccine risks. 

But there was little fanfare when, about the same time, an obscure federal program that compensates victims of vaccine injuries passed a milestone. Payouts by the national Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP, have now topped $4 billion.

Documented vaccine injuries are extremely rare. Over the past 30 years, the vaccine court has received 20,123 petitions claiming injuries and deaths, of which nearly 18,000 have been resolved. Of those, 6,313 have been approved for compensation through settlements or judgments. According to the Health Services & Resources Administration, that translates into approximately one compensable case for every one million doses of vaccines administered.

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The result is what is happening now in Washington where there is a crisis with several dozen cases of measles, most involving children who had not been vaccinated.  

Closer to home, as of the end of last week, three cases of measles have been reported in Atlanta — all three were in the same family and were not vaccinated.It wasn’t always this way. Twenty years ago, measles had been mostly wiped out in the U.S. 

Alas, the rise of social media in the early 2000s gave a small group of conspiracy theorists a new platform on which to spread their anti-vaccination propaganda. The result has been that parents in some areas have refused to have their children vaccinated, a situation that has led to a resurgence of measles.  

The anti-vaxxer movement is akin to many of the other crazy conspiracy movements that have found a home in social media. 

Some people believe the earth is flat.

DYI:  Out of the gate you take a cheap shot by lumping in anyone who questions the current dogma that vaccines are safe and effective are connected to the flat earth crowd.  Wow what a scientific approach to your reasoning.  

Some people believe the Holocaust didn’t happen.

DYI:  This blogger is Jewish and I have serious questions regarding the Holocaust.  Just mentioning a few questions makes one a heretic as this is just another way of pushing for self-censorship.   

Some people believe the moon landing was faked.

DYI:  Another opportunity to spread propaganda all for the staged faked moon landings.  Yep Mike you can count me in as one of those so called crazies.  There is now so much evidence that they were faked believing otherwise is simply nonsensical.  The books and videos are damn near endless exposing this 25 billion [in 1973 dollars] HOAX!   

Some people believe the attacks on 9/11 were an inside job.

DYI:  You can count me in… Anyone who believes the so called 9/11 official report are either too young to know; lazy to do any rudimentary investigation or is simply DELUSIONAL.  And there is a forth reason for espousing falsehoods as facts.  Simply put the individual in question is a shill [propagandist] for our government’s official position.

The 9/11 commission would have you believe that day airliners and buildings go against all basic aeronautical and structural engineering principals including all three of Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.  We are expected to believe that three steel framed buildings collapsed due to fire when no other buildings before or since has collapse.  Or that two airliners that supposedly hit each of the towers there was no debris [except the planted engine by the FBI (it was the wrong engine for the plane)] at the base of the buildings.  This is simply preposterous.  To say the least I could go on and on and on with one ridiculous notion our government has laid out as fact.             

All of those bogus beliefs can be found in various conspiracy theory websites and in mainstream social media memes. It’s all false, of course, but the drumbeat of fake information has begun to brainwash a lot of people who should know better. 

DYI:  Brainwashing???  The mainstream press is up to their eyeballs and beyond reporting these DHS FEMA all agencies mass casualties DRILLS; no one shot; no one killed or wounded; AS IF THEY ARE REAL!  We the common citizens are the ones who are being attempted to be brainwashed by the mainstream press not some so called rogue video or website/blogger.  They cannot even report on a damn hurricane without doing a majority of it in front of green [pretending as if he or she is actually there].  

The same thing is happening with the anti-vaccination movement where otherwise normal people have come to believe that they know more than their child’s doctor. I’ve had an anti-vaxxer parent tell me that very thing one time — because they had “researched” vaccinations on the internet, they believed they were smarter than their doctor about the subject. 

Another anti-vaxxer parent once told me that vaccinations didn’t rid the country of polio — it was other things, she said, that had eradicated the terrible disease.
Nuts. 

DYI:  Specific vaccines would have to be taken on a case by case basis.  However right during the time vaccines were being developed public health was improving by leaps and bounds.  Chlorinated water developed by Dr. John L. Leal in 1908 [Jersey City, New Jersey] was a mile stone improvement for stamping out water borne illnesses of all types.  This single breakthrough that spread throughout the world saved lives in the billions.  Add on sewage removal and then sewage treatment plants, simple garbage collection, plus the development of cars and trucks displacing horses in the city along with all of the manure and urine, all made enormous strides in the health of the public at the same time vaccines were being developed.          

Psuedo-science being posted on social media is the gasoline that has fueled the anti-vaxxer movement. Because of the growth in the anti-vaxxer universe, the World Health Organization has listed it as one of the top 10 threats to public health for 2019. 

The willful ignorance of real science might not be too bad if you’re a flat-earther (unless you’re an airplane pilot where factual knowledge about navigation of the round earth is kind of important). But willful ignorance about vaccinations is dangerous. 

How soon our society has forgotten the days before vaccines when polio, measles, whooping cough and other preventable diseases killed hundreds of thousands of children each year. Infections killed many more, both adults and children. 

The advent of antibiotics after WWII and the growth of vaccinations has saved millions of lives, especially children. Anti-vaxxers dispute that and claim vaccinations are dangerous despite solid evidence to the contrary.  

The movement got a boost about a decade ago when some Hollywood celebrities embraced the cause. Because of that, some parents started to believe the actors and fake social media memes rather than their own doctors, a testament to the gullibility of people caught up in today’s celebrity culture atmosphere. (As with politics, Russian “bots” have also been spreading anti-vaxxer messages on social media.)

DYI:  Just couldn’t help yourself just had to through in the Russians that so far zero conclusive or even superficial evidence supporting interference into our political or medical community.  Just had to jump on the Russia, Russia, Russia bandwagon.    

What’s really crazy about the anti-vaxxer movement is how some states accommodate it by passing laws that allow parents to opt out of having their children vaccinated for “religious” or “philosophical” reasons. (Georgia allows a religious exemption, but not a philosophical exemption.)  

Neither one should be allowed. The only reason for not vaccinating a child should be for medical reasons.  

That idea rubs against the more libertarian views of many anti-vaxxers who espouse the idea that “the government” should not force them to do anything with their children they don’t believe in and that they should have a “choice” of whether or not to vaccinate.  

But what a parent believes, or doesn’t believe, isn’t the issue. A parent may not believe in child safety seats in a car, but young children have to be in such a seat by law and parents have no “choice.” So why do we mandate safety car seats, but give parents a fig-leaf legal excuse to not have their child vaccinated? An unvaccinated child is at risk — that is no different than a child who isn’t in a seat belt. And not only are those children at risk, but they also pose a threat to other children who may be medically fragile and unable to be vaccinated.

DYI:  So now you are advocating the nanny state where big government is all seeing and all-knowing directing the masses all to their benefit.  Good Lord this is a freedom issue.  Should people use seat belts?  Of course they should but making compliance mandatory does not harm someone else’s family or individual(s).  Stupid yes but the last time I looked that was not against the law.     

Whatever our beliefs, our rights end when our actions pose a danger to our own children, or to others. It’s a medical issue and has nothing to do with what parents believe, especially when those beliefs come from the sewerage of fake information that flows through the social media ecosystem.

 DYI:  So you could give a damn as to what parents believe or don’t believe.  They must adhere to the vaccine dogma or have their children forcibly injected?  That is what your article is inferring is it not?

Just had to take another pot shot at independent web sites and bloggers; many who highlight the ongoing massive corruption within America up to and including big pharma.       

If you want to know how well vaccines work, look at the record of the polio vaccine, which has helped eliminate that terrible disease from most areas of the world. The only places polio continues to exist are in pockets where radical religious groups like the Taliban keep children from being vaccinated. 

DYI:  That is simply reinforcing that 9/11 was committed by the Taliban and not rogue elements of our government and the Israeli Mossad that is simply a clever use of propaganda.   

My wife and I were recently walking down the street in a developing country — a country filled with all kinds of superstitions — when we stopped to talk to a young boy walking with his mother. On one ankle, the little boy wore a silver bracelet that identified him as having taken the polio vaccine.  

If people in under-developed countries can embrace the need for childhood vaccinations, you’d think that as one of the world’s most developed and educated nations, we’d have no problem understanding the need for vaccinations in the U.S. 

It’s time for state laws to change and do away with both philosophical and religious exemptions to vaccinations. Those laws are nothing more than an embrace of willful ignorance. 

The current measles outbreak in Washington is proof of what happens when parents start believing social media junk science over their own doctors and real science.  

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.

DYI:  Simply put Mike Buffington is a fascist.  That the State knows best and damn any parent that gets in the way.

Side note:  I don’t know for a fact but my experience this article was most likely came out of a writing committee of the CIA.  If not then Buffington has experience in these matters.

DYI