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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Worth reposting:

[quote]Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles.

- Roald Dahl[/quote]

https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/roald-dahl-lost-his-daughter-to-measles-his-heartbreaking-letter-on-vaccination-is-very-relevant-today/[/quote]

Olivia Dahl died on November 17, 1962, at the age of seven. She died just one year before the first measles vaccine was licensed in the U.S. and six years before it became available in Britain.

How can we allow as a society people without the measles vaccine who have no medical reason not to be vaccinated to attend schools, fly on planes, and attend places with large gatherings such as Disneyworld?  Currently only four states—California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York—prohibit non-medical (religious or philosophical) exemptions for school-entry vaccines.[/quote]

I totally agree. Unless you have a medical reason, you shouldn't be able to go to school or be in any public place without vaccines. If we do that, herd immunity will protect those who have medical reasons as well as those too young to be vaccinated and those who are immunocompromised.

These anti-vax mothers should feel responsible - I know this won't happen in a court of law, but they should be blamed and acknowledge the responsibility - not only for the illness of their children but for every person that child infects, and every person those people infect. RFK Jr should and Trump should be held legally responsible for all these hospitalizations and deaths.[/quote]

NP. I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I’m not of your tribe, and I’m sure you’d be livid if someone you cared about had my views on these subjects. I’m genuinely curious about the following, and I don’t mean this rhetorically: if you had to, do you think you could articulate the reasons why some people suspect a connection between vaccination and developmental disability? I don’t mean an answer at the level of generality along the lines of “ignorance” or “anti-science,” but literally like a good-faith exposition of their position?[/quote]

I'll take a stab:
Smallpox tended to be deadlier in the American colonies than in continental Europe, where innoculation was more controversial (trying to interfere with the will of God); royalty innoculating themselves and their own children helped get people to accept it there.

In the 1800s, diptheria epidemics were common. Rural cemeteries in the midwest often have stones with the names of 4 or more children to died within a short time of each other in the 1880s to 1890s. When ditheria serum, and eventually an actual vaccine, were developed plenty of people knew how devasting the disease could be. Tetanus was sometimes called 4th of July tetanus, because fireworks injuries led to tetanus cases around the 4th that equaled the number of cases the rest of the entire year. People had seen those diseases and the havoc they created.

Military use of vaccines probably also helped with public acceptance. And the midcentury polio outbreaks were so heavily publicized, and the vaccine campaign heavily promoted, nobody would question it. And public schools required it.

But then, fueled in large part by the religious right, homeschooling became legal where it hadn't been and became much more widespread. Easier to opt out. And if you were questioning what the government was teaching your children, vaccines were something the govt inflicted.

The 1976 swine flu had major effects as well. Nobody knew if it would be as bad as the 1918 flu but the earliest case--a soldier who got sick one day and was dead by the next--looked a lot like the 1918 epidemic. The decision to vaccinate the entire country was a difficult one to make, especially since a massive vaccine program would 1) inevitable have some side effects and 2) would inevitably by followed by coincidental medical problems and deaths that would have happened anyway,(besides which, if successful people would think there would never have been a serious epidemic anyway). The pharma companies needed to be indemnified before they would participate. Some cases of what were thought to be (but weren't) guillane-barre following vaccination led to monitoring for the disease (which on later analysis did not seem to increase at all due to vaccination but at the time was thought to be an effect in some cases). So then an entire apparatus--VAERS plus legal proceedings--had to be set up to deal with the onslaught of claims and to figure out which may have been due to the vaccine. Since VAERS is an open reporting system, people believe it is reporting actual side effects of vaccines rather than just stuff that happened after being vaccinated, or stuff claimed to have happened.

Then we had hep B for children, and people don't like the idea of something they regard as sexually transmitted being a reason to vaccinate kids. And the autism claims. We also have the mercury in dental fillings leaking over the the vaccines/autism "link". HPV vaccine being given to teen girls--offends Christian morals (govt is trying to get our daughters to have sex).

In the course of the decades, we learn about WWII soldiers deliberately exposed to radiation, the CIA LSD experiments, the Tuskegee experiments, Agent Orange, all the things government does not disclose when it's happening.

Another factor might just be that once we had effective antibiotics, deaths due to secondary infections from a particular disease dropped, so any disease became less dangerous. [/quote]

It comes down to this: people have had the luxury to put their egos and ignorance first without having to pay the price for it. Enough people did the right thing that the weirdos could coast on their nonsense. That time is over now.

It’s a shame some people have to learn the hard way from the lessons of the past,  but in many ways we’re even worse off now than we were before. [b]The older doctors who would have known the danger signs of complications and had experience with moving quickly have retired and been replaced with doctors that have never seen these diseases nor their complications in practice. It is going to be a very, very steep learning curve. And hospital bills routinely bankrupt families for generations now.[/b] If you’re poor, you might as well keep your kid home to die, because you can’t afford for him to come out of it disabled for life. [/quote]

I had not considered either of these points. You are right, and these facts make the outbreaks more worrisome. [/quote]

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