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Get vaccinated. Obviously.

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johnson1010
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Get vaccinated. Obviously.

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In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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geo

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Re: Get vaccinated. Obviously.

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Vaccines do save many more people than hurt them, it's true. But I can understand the hesitance that parents have in vaccinating their children. There is the occasional adverse reaction to vaccines which, though very rare, are pretty tragic.

My wife's younger sister had a violent reaction to the rubella vaccine. She started having seizures when she was about two. As a consequence she was severely mentally retarded. (She tragically died while having a seizure a few years ago.) Anyway, when it came time for my first son to get his vaccinations, we wondered if it was possible if there might be a genetic link for the kind of susceptibility that my wife's younger sister had. We did a lot of research and delayed getting my son's rubella shots until he was about four. In Japan, they do the vaccines a little differently than in the U.S. and have a significantly lower incidence of adverse reactions.

But yeah, ultimately it's much more likely for tragedy to strike if you don't get your child immunized. Jenny McCarthy has spent years claiming that her son's autism was caused by vaccination, but recently found out her son more likely suffered from another rare disorder. Her son was misdiagnosed. So it's not an exact science. We do know that vaccinations work though.
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johnson1010
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Re: Get vaccinated. Obviously.

Unread post

In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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lehelvandor
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Re: Get vaccinated. Obviously.

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Indeed :)

On the very mechanism itself, empirically (and so riskily proven by Pasteur initially), we still have a LOT of discourse in media and especially on the proverbial street where one hears the wonderful words "I don't believe in vaccines" or "they cause more harm than good" or "vaccines don't agree with me" (perhaps the latter is least idiotic, as it, in a clumsy way, point to perhaps a side-effect reaction that one may have had and then generalised of course to not only all vaccines, but also to their primary effects, too).

As Eco said nicely, we really have returned to the mindset of the medieval man.

Vaccines, as many other things, are "magic" created and practiced by magicians whom we don't understand and don't want to understand (i.e. we assume we can't understand anyway so... let's resort to pseudo-scientific other sources).

On a less philosophical note, it is true that, as in the UK it happened recently, there is a need for "propaganda" / education of the masses so that many years of vaccination are not undone - i.e. almost completely eradicated nasties stage a glorious return and again start affecting large proportions of the population.

When pseudo-scientific emotional discourse gets this dangerous, one feels that maybe some dictatorial measure should impose a few things that served us well :)

It is not helped much by huge gaffes that scientists do, like in the UK the not so long ago published claim that combined vaccines in kids cause autism. This was completely destroyed and retracted later, and the idiots who again confused correlation with causality got well slapped around the head... but the damage was done.

It still reverberates in conversations, and people point to the old "finding" - and, as usual with paranoid pseudo-scientific discourse, the counter-evidence is put down to "propaganda" by "large companies" etc. etc... and one lands in a traditional conspiracy theory again.
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