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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnti-Vaxxers Spread A Plague Of Ignorance
January 23, 2019 4:24 am / 0 Comments / Far Right, Featured Post, Government, Health, Medicine
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
An outbreak of measles four years ago at Disneyland focused attention on a growing health menace the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children. The threat has gone international. The World Health Organization has just named the anti-vaccination movement among the 10 biggest global health crises.
Italy is ground zero, thanks to a law pushed by the far-right 5-Star Movement that ended compulsory vaccinations for children in public schools. Matteo Salvini, leader of its coalition partner, the League party, called mandatory vaccinations useless and in many cases dangerous.
The anti-vaxxer crusade has a diverse membership. In addition to traditional right-wingers and radical libertarians who say the decision to not immunize their children should be a matter of personal liberty, it includes rich progressives who view vaccinations as unhealthy. (Far more students in Californias well-to-do Capistrano Unified School District were found to be unvaccinated than in Santa Ana, its poorer neighbor.)
The vaccine-hesitant the WHOs politer term often wave ignorant junk-science claims that vaccines can cause autism. This dangerous lie gained traction in a 1998 article published in the prestigious British journal The Lancet. It turned out that lawyers suing vaccine-makers were funding the author, Andrew Wakefield. Britain subsequently stripped Wakefield of the right to practice medicine.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/anti-vaxxers-spread-a-plague-of-ignorance/
tblue37
(65,551 posts)Aristus
(66,530 posts)How anti-vaxxers are able to get past Tiny and the velvet rope and get in here where there are rational, logic-minded people, I'll never know.
The Genealogist
(4,723 posts)A lot of the diseases we vaccinate again not only kill people, they leave a lot of survivors disabled for life. Polio is but one example. Junk science is going to bring back these terrible illnesses, as more parents buy into it because it fits whatever narrative they buy into.
CaliforniaPeggy
(149,827 posts)Part of the reason for their belief is the fact that immunizations have been so successful, few of these folks have experienced the dreadful illnesses and deaths that used to accompany childhood.
People who remember those times tend to want to vaccinate the children. These folks remember and know how valuable vaccines are.