Surprise surprise, her doctorate is in psychology. She works with special ed kids and I'm guessing she's either decided or parents are self-reporting that they're "vaccine injured." 🙄 What an asshole.
"My little Johnny was a perfect student until the medical establishment gave him a learning disability!"
This seems to overlap psychologically with the "my child can do no wrong" crowd, the ones who blame teachers, coaches, librarians, video games, sugar, red dye, gluten, participation trophies, or pretty much anyone or anything except themselves for their child's problems. The common thread is a profound lack of self-awareness.
On the anti-vaccination issue, there's also a hefty dose of misinformation from people who are making money from selling the idea to gullible people, but there's definitely a certain psychological profile who falls for it most often.
I feel like a lot of these parents are also doing the insidious thing of trying to justify that it isn't "their genes" that are responsible. Like having Autism or something in your family is a dirty secret and "taints" their "family line".
Nobody would give two shits if that was the problem. The problem is that their behavior endangers the safety of others and the integrity of society.
I don't just mean people who cannot be vaccinated. Without vaccines, lockdowns like the ones during the covid pandemic would be in effect pretty much all the time. We have functioning vaccines against diseases that are much worse than covid. We got lucky in 2020.
People like to bitch and moan about the inconveniences endured during covid and would use terms like "doom sayers" to insult people who promoted lockdowns and vaccines. Under the guise of "it wasn't that bad".
Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Without lockdowns and vaccines it would've been ten times worse. We actually got relatively scot-free. Huge swaths of the developing world endured millions of deaths.
Society before vaccines didn't have lockdowns all the time, the mortality was higher because you died of disease now almost forgotten. During epidemics a lot of things still had to get done, the corpses didn't remove themselves, people still needed food, water and their shit carried off.
I'm not sure many people against vaccines these days have met anyone who got the diseases everyone is vaccinated for nowadays. Polio as a child? You survived? Great, you'll have a limp and bad joints your whole life…
Weren't some states instituting book bans for subjects considered "harmful"? This seems like a prime opportunity to twist some poorly written state laws and do some actual good with them.
No. States were removing books from school libraries based on content, though. I always feel a bit bitter when I research something and realize I've been misled. Book banning isn't really allowed.
While this book existing is whatever, it shouldn't be in any school. Hopefully no public libraries either.
I have a distant cousin who was totally destroyed by measles. According to her mom, she was 6 years old and a very bright kid, very eager to learn. Her siblings recovered, but she didn’t. I mean, she recovered as far as surviving, but she’s in her late 50s now with the mental capacity of a toddler.
Her family lived in a one room shack deep in Appalachia from the 50s through the 80s. Going to the doctor wasn’t something they did unless they were dying. They managed to get her to the hospital once it became clear she likely wasn’t going to make it.
I met her in the early 2000s and different family members take turns caring for her. She talks but it’s mostly just going with what a person says. “Sheila, I heard you were a millionaire!” “Yeah, yeah. I got millions dollars. Yeah.” “Can I get a few thousand?” “Sure, yeah, sure, a few thousand. Yep. Mmhmmm.”
Her brother used to mess with her at the store her mom worked at. “Hey Shiela, you hate that ugly bastard that just walked in here don’t you?” “Yep. Mmhmm. I hate that ugly bastard.” “Awww Sheila, you hate me and think I’m ugly?” “Noooooooo. Nuh uh. Nooooo!” “Yes you do, now tell him!” “Yep, mmhmm, I do.”
First time I'm hearing about "vaccine injured" meaning they think a vaccine caused autism or something. When I read the post, with the context, I thought it meant like a physical injury that someone with special needs might suffer if they moved around during a vaccine. It's actually disgusting that this person wrote a story likely about a kid with some form of neurodivergence and called toted them as a "vaccine injured child".
It looks suspiciously like a pay-for-award company that gives out awards to just about any product for parents/educators/related to children or parenting, as long as you pay the "application fee" (although they specifically say an award isn't guaranteed).
I mean looking at their website they seem to give out an awful lot of awards, and they mention that for $500, you'll get to use their award seal on your product and receive 100 award stickers, and for $1,500 you get more stickers, plus they'll post about your product on their website.
Call me crazy, but I'd think that if an award isn't guaranteed, they'd make you pay for the initial application to start with, and then (assuming you "win" an award) they'd offer to promote your product for an additional payment, once they've decided that you're eligible. The fact that they talk so openly about how paying a larger application fee gets you promoted on their site (and some other stuff) makes it seem suspiciously like a pay-for-award scheme to me.
WTF is "Gold Moms Choice Award"? The newest warning label?
If the Americans are so keen about banning books, they should really start with this one. Ever thought about "What if books could kill?" - This one can.
Winners who pay $500 may use the Mom’s Choice Awards seal “for marketing and promotional purposes” BUT must pay the $1500 fee to actually put the seal on the books. Unless you purchase the stick on seals, 100 for $50.00.
I've met this kind of awards somewhere. One supermarket chain boasted that one of their businesses won the "Supermarket of the Year" award. And the next year it was again that one of their locations won that price. So I dug a bit deeper and learned that they own the local version of "Supermarket of the Year" award, and only markets of their own chain "participate".
Imagining a big pot of molten gold, and a middle aged woman in one of those perfect blonde helmet hair cuts slowly dipping her elderly mother into it, while laughing and screaming about how "I'm going to post you to instagram! I'm going to treasure you forever!"
How does being a psychologist constitute a reasonable qualification to have any weight on the matter? Vaccinations belong to the field of pharmacology, on which psychologists have no training whatsoever (possibly aside from psychiatric drugs) and if they do, they're most likely a psychiatrist, in which case they're doctor first and psychologist second.
The author has no qualifications whatsoever to talk about vaccines, aside from her doctoral dissertation, which I would consider questionable at best.
She's a psychologist who works primarily with special education/special needs kids, and believes that a lot of developmental disabilities are the result of vaccinations.
Honestly, that would be preferable to the reality. Unvaccinated children, by and large, aren't the people who suffer from their parents' shitty choices. I wouldn't want anyone to suffer, but if it were the unvaccinated children who suffer most, it would be easier to make the case to ignorant and selfish people who don't want to vaccinate.
No vaccine is completely effective, and each infection is an opportunity for mutation and spread. Not everyone who gets infected will get sick. Not everyone who gets sick will have severe illness or even the same symptoms. The people who suffer the most are the very young, the immunocompromised, the elderly, and the poor. If you're talking to someone who thinks their internet googling is as valid as actual medical doctors doing actual scientific research, it's going to be harder to convince them to do something for the greater good.
So I went on Amazon and there it is, sitting at 186 5 star reviews. WTF. Genuine question: is there some way of reporting shit like this to Amazon? I can't see anything obvious.
It is true that vaccines can have rare adverse effects. That's why we have clinical trials and experts evaluate if the benefits massively outweigh the risks. Vaccines are never really 100% safe, but always pretty damn close.
And ultimately, the disease the vaccine prevents is much more dangerous than the side effects. Rare reactions can kill you, but measles is much more likely to.
It’s like the people who refuse to wear seatbelts because they have the potential to harm you in an accident.
Yah, props for mentioning, all to often it's a question that goes unanswered in these discussions. I completely agree the pros outweigh the cons and it's better to eradicate some of these diseases. I fear that a big reason some who choose to not vaccinate do so is because of the lack of transparency about vaccine injury. They have a family member or close acquaintance that experienced it firsthand and the public discussion around it is often toxic to the point it feels conspiratorial with people only pointing to the Wakefield study (which was garbage so doesn't help either side). Researching it without a great understanding of it can return a lot of confirmation bias too.
Back in the beginning of vaccines, there was 1 in 100 chance of dying of the vaccine. Of course, smallpox killed you 1 out of 3. People are pretending we're still at that 1/100 rate for modern vaccines.
Assuming you're talking about the Polio vaccine, that 1-in-100 stat is way off. It was never that bad.
The rollout for the Salk vaccine (the original polio vaccine) in the 1950’s was for 1.3 million children. It was probably the worst vaccine incident of all time because Cutter Laboratories, who produced roughly 200,000 of the doses, made defective batches that contained still living polio virus (and because of how vaccines are made now this is no longer an issue). Several thousand reported cases of polio, 200 permanent injured, and 10 dead.
Even if you were one of the unlucky people to specifically receive a defective vaccine, you still only had a 1/20000 chance of dying. If you look at the entire rollout then it was only 1/130000.
You're right about the 1-in-3 chance of dying from polio though, so even with it being one of the least effective and most dangerous vaccines ever mass produced it was still hailed as a massive success and won numerous people Nobel prizes.
Farthest thing from an anti-vaxer so please me out. There is a small select group of people who have legitimate reasons why they can't get vaccinated.
Unless you are being told by your doctor you can not get vaccinated, you should get vaccinated. End of story. Heard immunity helps protect those in our society who have serious health issues and can't get vaccinated.
Vaccination should be considered a required civic duty, but I do believe allowances should be made with individuals with certain health conditions.
Any vaccine mandate would have exceptions, and a process for applying for an exception, along with mandatory alternative treatment plans like directions to isolate during periods of higher risk.
Unfortunately, I've heard of people getting rejected from places for being unvaccinated because their particular condition, often in the case of rare ones, is one that doesn't qualify for "vaccine exemption" despite there being legitimate reasons for it.
Everyone who's able to should definitely get vaxxed, but the way the system currently works can be a problem for certain people who have actual reasons for medical exemption.
Yuck. There should be no way out religious or otherwise for vaccines unless medically unable. just gives people power to wriggle free of commitments they don't want to keep.
My friend's son has a more gradual vaccine schedule because he's autistic and needles are very hard for him. Understandable, but they still make sure he gets them all.
I'm actually pretty proud to say that everybody in my extended family got vaccinated with only one exception, and she was an 18-year-old who thought she was invincible. That probably has something to do with the fact that my dad and all of his older (remaining) siblings still remember having to get the polio vaccine, and all of my cousins and myself have heard all about it even years before this nonsense happened. It pays to get a basic education, who'd've thunk it.
I wonder if they are offering a bundle deal along with the sequel to the book about a lady who swallowed a fly titled When Bobby swallowed a little worm.
My favorite part was when he swallowed the ivermectin to kill the worm. The illustration for that page is particularly captivating.
I don't understand why anyone would be against vaccines, with one exception: parents who have a kid that actually suffered from one of the super rare side effects. For example I have seen a documentary about pro/contra vaccine, where one person featured was a child who had gotten polio as a result of the polio vaccine.
My sister was unable receive a full set of vaccinations due to a bad allergic reaction, which makes my parents even more pro vaccines because she relies on herd immunity
I feel like it's a bit like terminally ill people suddenly finding religion. Parents with autistic children are desperate to find something to blame or believe in for their situation. So, they've latched onto this absolute fiction that vaccination can cause autism. Nevermind it was something like a single study done that has since been completely disproved. Notice Nicholas up there has an "older, vaccine injured sibling".
This just seems like a shitpost. "I'm _____ and that's OK!" with that style, arms up "hooray" and that mouth agape smile, it's just such a trope I'd only ever thought was reversed for farce.
Are these people so fucking stupid they think looking like a farce is a good thing? Wait, unfortunately I already have the answer....
Ah well, society is fucked and we're all fucked anyway.