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9:32am February 22, 2012

➸ STOP your Mommy Fear Mongering you ignorant buffoons

plaidred:

^^ Click the link to read the news article ^^

Autism has NOTHING to do with vaccines, okay? It is something that wether or not the child will develop it is decided in the womb and progresses as the brain matures. Not vaccinating your kids because of a fear of autism is mommy fear mongering. I’d rather have a child with autism than a dead child anyways. When I have a child of my own I know I will constantly be paranoid about other children who have not had their vaccinations interacting with my kid. We are living in the year 2012, and we have a real chance to stop the spread of some vicious diseases that have been around for thousands of years. Still allowing these diseases to exist allows for a chance of mutation that could affect even those that have had their shots, and what then, and entire pandemic like the days of old? If you’re a vaccine shunning hipster I hope that you live to watch everyone around you die of terrible, preventable diseases

And it’s not just children that the vaccines protect. It’s also anyone immunosuppressed, and anyone with any of a huge variety of health problems. 

My friend, who will be on immunosuppressant drugs the rest of her life, caught whooping cough from an unvaccinated child.  She ended up in the emergency room after dislocating several ribs and becoming so dehydrated that normal rehydration procedures didn’t work.  Then she began having seizures as a result of the dehydration. She could easily have died. 

I have a lung disorder that’s rare in developed countries because the most common cause is vaccine-preventable diseases.  As a result of this lung damage, I’m more susceptible to lung infections as a result of diseases like cold, flu, and pneumonia, and have serious trouble clearing phlegm even without being sick. Such infections can cause more of the same damage. Then the damage creates more susceptibility to infections. If this cycle continues long enough, you die because your heart can no longer pump blood properly through the damaged parts of your lungs. 

Which means that not only might the initial infections that caused the damage have been preventable by vaccines (although that’s not clear in my case since we don’t know what caused it), but vaccine-preventable diseases can set off a vicious cycle that could kill me if asthma didn’t do it first.  And this is when I’m not on immunosuppressants due to my asthma!

So I take vaccines incredibly seriously. I think people who avoid vaccines from anything other than a true medical reason (autism and fake diagnoses made by quacks don’t count), are selfish and irresponsible.  

In some cases, anti-vaccine people have even said that it’s unnatural that people like me and my friend are alive, and that it would be better if we were dead – both to ensure that only stronger people survive and to prevent overpopulation. (Anyone notice how when people start talking about overpopulation, it’s always disabled people, poor people, brown people, etc. that they want dead?) In which case they’re either eugenics types or little better. But even the ones who truly fear autism are being selfish. They’d rather people be dead than people be autistic. That’s what it really adds up to, even if they don’t think it through all the way to that point.  Not that vaccines make any difference in the numbers of autistic people, but that’s how they think. 

And it’s babies, elderly people, people who truly can’t be vaccinated, people without access to vaccines, and disabled people who tend to suffer the most when anti-vaccine people have their way. There are countries who don’t have vaccines even though they could, because mostly well-off white people in developed countries have convinced them that vaccines are terrible.  So lots of people suffer and die because a few people are scared of something mostly harmless.  And I find that disgusting and unforgivable. 

So yeah. People who are against vaccines really need to rethink it. And not just because they don’t cause autism. But because refusing them causes death as well as some truly obnoxious damage to the body. And in a twist that would be funny if it weren’t a serious issue:  One of the only known external causes of autism is a mother having rubella while pregnant.  So forgoing vaccines because you fear autism, causes autism. WTF.