I live on an island in the Puget Sound, and it's a problem here as well. A couple of months ago there were cases at the high school, middle school and one of the elementary schools simultaneously. A friend has a young daughter who can't be immunized, and for her safety pulled her out to home-school for the rest of the year.

These idiots who won't get their kids immunized are the ones who should home-school, and keep their kids away from everyone sane. My friend would love to be able to get her kid immunized, and she absolutely hates the fuckers who don't give a shit about (or understand) herd immunity.

A note for grown-ups, definitely get your tetanus/whooping cough shots updated. Protection from idiots and rusty fish hooks.

Amy, I really think you're being too hard on McCarthy abou




Naw, fuckit, you're right.

Hit her with stick, whatever. Do what you need to do.

(Minor, minor detail: We should be just as eager to punish the idiot publishers and broadcasters who gave her the space to convey her murderous stupidities. These workaday functionaries… local-morning-show producers and weekend-magazine-section editors… are not good people. They aren't to be forgiven for their part in these deaths.)

How about making the parents fully responsible for the medical bills of all the other kids who get sick, because they **know** that vaccinations are bad.

At least, their health insurance companies should be dropping them, or letting them pay in full when young Stewie goes to the doctor with a preventable disease.

We can't fix stupid, but why not make it expensive?

Crid, you're absolutely right on the media.

Hopefully a couple of the anti vaxxers kids die in agony.

Pain is the only teaching tool humans really pay attention to.

Don't forget fear lujlp. Seeing a friend in an iron lung made me take every precaution I could to prevent getting polio. I even ate non-treated sugar cubes.

My coworker just had a kid and he and his wife took birthing classes. Austin is also one of "those" cities, and so there were a handful of parents in the class who were vocally anti-vax. One of them gave my coworker some anti-vax literature.

He was telling me he was feeling awkward because he obviously wasn't going to read it, and this woman kept asking him if he'd read it yet and asking him what he thought.

I was like, "There's nothing awkward about this! Give her the book back and tell her to keep her f*cking kids the hell away from yours!"

Hey, Kimberly, is it Whidbey Island?

Some of the WORST people I know are anti-vaxx. It just seems endemic to the "I'm better and smarter than you so I can do whatever the hell I want" crowd.

I have 2 kids, and believe me nobody LIKES taking them in for vaccines. But we do it because we're not fucking morons

The absolute worse of these worst people constantly posts this stupid picture that says, "If vaccines work, why is my unvaccinated child a threat to your vaccinated child?"

Because not everybody can get vaccinated, you conceited bitch, but what are the lives of a few strangers so you can masturbate to the superior-parent glow?

Yep Sosij, Whidbey Island. You describe the anti-vaxxers I'm familiar with perfectly.

Crid - yes, that's one of the points Seth Mnookin makes in his book, "the Panic Virus." People like the Today Show or Oprah ("it's her truth") that validated MCarthy's opinion. Seth documents how McCarthy's transition from getting all new age to sell crap to getting all anti-vax to sell her crap. When the View gave her a job, he posted his McCarthy chapter for free.

http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2013/07/15/a-jenny-mccarthy-reader-pt-1-the-birth-of-a-star-and-an-embrace-of-crystal-children/

That was a good book Catherine. I read it while pregnant with my second. I am very pro vax, but know a lot of anti-vaxers. It's very prevalent where I live (Portland, Oregon). An acquaintance of mine is strongly anti-vax, has not vaccinated either of her children and refuses to update her boosters. I should mention she's also a special education teacher up on an island in Washington as well. Anyway, she and both of her kids cane down with pertussis and her 3-year-old had to be hospitalized for two weeks with it. No worries though. She gets Medicaid so the state, i.e. taxpayers, picked up the tab for her stupidity. After all this she refuses to believe not vaccinating had anything to do with her situation and will not even consider the possibility. I'm very sensitive to the issue of vaccinating. Two of my three children have been born preemies with fragile immune systems and are highly susceptible to illnesses. They were all vaccinated on schedule as we, along with their doctors, felt the benefits far outweighed the risks to waiting until they were older and healthier. There is concern the immunizations may not have taken fully, but at least we did what we could. I'm always fearful of my kids going anywhere when they are young because so many are irresponsible on this issue.

Further exposition for Catherine, who will probably never come back here again anyway:


Journalists should say whatever they want. But they should also know that scientific truth is not about matters of personal whim, even where it's presented as "theory".

Specifically, and this is directly on point, evolution really happened. The retardation of these ailments following safe inoculation of populations is factually demonstrable by evolutionary principle. These conclusions are closed to casual improvement by breezy discussions of the some-say-yes/some-say-no variety, the kind favored by media sleaze left and right.

In the best years of my career and until very recently, I made a living in celebrity sleaze media. I sincerely believe it has virtues; for people who are lonely and isolated, it gives rewarding demonstrations on how talent and luck and the relentless natural world scatter rewards around our culture, however temporarily.

And even when pop culture doesn't ennoble, it's a free Goddamn country. You should be able to consume the media you want... Whether it's witless pornography, afternoon game shows, silly "Christian" ministry programming or whatever the high-toned drama is this season. ('Thrones.')

However...

I will expect anyone exploiting our shared media spaces (broadcast especially) for profit to know the difference between funtime bickering and personal tales of heartache (McCarthy) and the majestic-if-imperfect strictures of modern medicine.

No matter where that woman has been to be interviewed or quoted, there's been a community college nearby... From which even a mediocre biology undergrad could have been approached to supply conclusive, if not to say damning, rebuttal.

Whether the producers themselves have been to college, or ever studied biology, they should have had the decency to do that. They didn't.

Blood on their hands.

I am here often Crid. Just don't post much.

Thank you for your response.

A doctor friend of mine recently posted on FB that she has had several patients get pertussis this year... ALL of whom were vaccinated. The difference in outcomes was how quickly the correct diagnosis was made and antibiotics were administered (note: this friend is a specialist, not a primary, so she wasn't the one doing diagnosis or care for acute illness, but she heard about it from the patients when she asked about anything that had happened medically between visits)