Anti-vaccination is why we can't have nice things, like good health

Let me preface this by saying I despise anti-vaxxers almost as much as I despise the religious. This cause of theirs is almost like a religion to them, especially when you consider they have zero proof of their claims.

So as I'm sure most of you know, Jenny McCarthy is a dumb blonde. She is also the moron who decided that since she made a defective kid and didn't want to take the blame for it, she was going to go after vaccines instead. She had zero scientific evidence that this was the cause of her kid's autism, but since this all happened after he got his shots, it MUST have been the cause, right?

Wrong. That is what we call a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, aka questionable cause. Correlation does not imply causation. Just because something happened after something else, doesn't necessarily mean that the first thing was the cause of the second thing. This is something your average 'Murican just doesn't understand.

Here's a little gem I found on the intarwebs that accurately describes how every intellectual, thinking individual feels about anti-vaxxers. This verbal smackdown comes from an immunologist, so I'm more inclined to trust his claims over some stupid mom who knows absolutely fuckall about modern medicine:

You may have to click this to make it bigger

Also, to quote Paracelsus, the father of toxicology: "Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." So if you don't want to poison yourself, I guess you'd better stop eating, breathing, drinking, and existing, because frankly, even the air is poison in this cigarette/pollution filled world we live in.

Doing research on this subject, I was amazed at the number of anti-vax posts and images that have popped up on the internet over the last 2 years or so that this has been a thing. The common thread between all of them is one of a few things, sometimes all of them at once:

1) Doctors are somehow unqualified to perform a simple medical procedure
2) The FDA/Gubmint is trying to kill all the Christians/Vegans/insert group here because NWO or something
3) Medicine is unnatural and we should only use crystals/roots/incense to heal ourselves

The amount of dumbfuckery is seriously amazing. I have a friend who is one of those paragons of "natural living", so much so that she makes a hippie look downright mainstream, who makes the claim that everyone can decide for themselves what they want to do and we shouldn't challenge them or make fun of them.

WRONG. Letting people do what they want as long as it impacts ONLY THEMSELVES is just fine, but when your bad decisions not only affect your kids, but everyone else around you, THEN we get to say "no, you're retarded, vaccinate your fucking children." These kids need their parents to stop playing games with their health, instead of being an idealistic fuckwit who gambles with their kid's lives just to prove a point that has no scientific or factual support.

Let me put it another way: There are a lot of people who CAN'T get vaccinated because they're allergic to certain things found in most vaccines, and that's fine. I can understand that. Those people RELY on the general 'herd immunity' of everyone else who ISN'T allergic and does get vaccinated, so they don't catch these deadly diseases. When you get a bunch of people claiming that vaccines are poison and they refuse to have them... these people's lives are put in jeopardy because of your idiocy.

Then you hear the cries of people who are afraid the government will force them to get vaccinated.

Honestly, we should do that. We should absolutely do that. The only reason we don't is because here in 'Murica we're still stuck with this private insurer bullshit where people have to pay out of pocket for medical procedures, so these greedy assholes can stick it to you while sticking you. If we had a true single-payer system like in EVERY other industrialized nation, we should definitely make vaccination mandatory (excepting those who are allergic, of course). When it is a matter of public health and safety, absolutely the government should step in and take care of business.

Here's a fun chart:

Before vaccinations were invented in 1798 with the first smallpox vaccine, by Edward Jenner, mortality rates caused by diseases such as smallpox, cholera, rabies, tetanus, typhoid fever, bubonic plague (yes, for real), were through the fucking ROOF. Basic quarantine procedures allowed for some way to contain the spread of an outbreak, but there were so many of these outbreaks that it was like stamping out a stray ember while your house burns down.

After the process was publicized and began to be used for other diseases other than smallpox, over the next 200 years mortality rates from these deadly diseases plummeted to near zero as more and more people were vaccinated against them. This is why we have such a huge, growing world population now, because we're not seeing people die off in droves due to diseases we can now prevent completely.

This is the world that anti-vaxxers want to return to, although they idealize it as a "better time" before modern technology and medicine and shit. They sound just like the idiotic vegans and hippies who scream about anything that's not "organic" or "natural". Let me let you in on a little secret: EVERYTHING IS NATURAL. If it exists, it is natural, as it is made from elements found in nature. Just because something is made in a lab rather than grown in the dirt doesn't mean it is automatically bad, and in most cases, it's BETTER. That's what we call fucking PROGRESS.

Finally, to put a ribbon on this tirade against stupidity, I was having a conversation with one of my highschool friends, who was taking his newborn to get immunized, and one of our "acquaintances" (I am not going to give her the status of friend, because I'm not friends with abject morons) decided to chime in with her two cents about how vaccines are poison yadda yadda yadda.

This girl is literally dumber than a box of rocks, and her husband isn't much better. Oh yeah, they're poor white trash living in backwoods Vermont, no surprise there. Sarah Parisi and Jeremy Infante are prime examples of how believing everything you hear without any credible scientific evidence makes you a fucking dipshit. Infante is an appropriate last name for them, since their thought processes are truly infantile.

She got upset when someone told her she was wrong with facts to show why, and basically dismissed the argument out of hand, claiming he was being "rude". I then told her that whether or not you think someone is rude, that doesn't invalidate their argument, and to stop getting so butthurt anytime someone disagrees with you. Her response was to block me. Typical conservative move (yes, she is a Republican fascist).

So in closing: get your fucking kids vaccinated. If you don't, you are guilty of endangering a child, and endangering the public health, and should be fined and have your kid taken away at the very LEAST.

That will be all.