Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican congresswoman and a staunch ally of Trump, suggested a return to “measles parties” for children. She criticized contemporary attitudes towards vaccination, stating, “Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.”
Measles parties will kill kids.
MTG is a psychopath.
Thanks to the magic of internet brain …
Her initials being MTG I always think of the MTG ass crack meme and so she is forever defaulted as a hairy ass rack in my brain.
That’s the image of her I have.
Thank you.
bet she won’t be censured for “decorum violations”.
Measles isn’t fucking chicken pox…
Don’t even take chicken pox lightly. It gives you shingles later in life. I have epilepsy as a result of getting chicken pox.
Chickenpox is also pretty dangerous to adults, they cause similar issues like an adult getting measles or rubella, and it’s capable of causing pneumonia and orchitis( infertility), there is a small chance it can cause brain inflammation much like shingles can
Arrest her for attempted homicide
Laws are not made for the rich and in line. Its made for us. We can complain all we want but we should be able to all see this pattern by now
She thinks the measles are like chicken pox, pretty much harmless to young ones. My parents tried to get me sick in the 70s, that’s just how it was done before we had a chicken pox vaccine. Finally got it at 16, still have the scars nearly 40-years later. But I got my shingles vax!
She’s literally this stupid. Some things we see these nuts try to pull off make sense, from an evil point of view. This move is plain stupid, and because we’ve forgotten what measles are people will listen.
BTW, I’m 54 and just now learning what measles are and how bad it can be. I had no clue, because I’ve never met anyone that had it.
Wait? I can get vaccinated for shingles after having chicken pox? Is that a thing?
no, it makes sense. devaluing human life, and spreading the idea that sometimes the weak just die, with nothing anyone can do about it, is very much something they want to do. plus, burying your children is one hell of a sunk cost.
that’s not to say she’s cognitively functional, but that’s why her masters won’t put their foot down.
i had chickenpox as a kid, i remember the aveeno baths for it, we were set in the same room to “inonculate” the rest of the siblings. as there was no vaccine at the time. Chickenpox is quite severe for adults though. i did get shingles around 20yo though. theres is shingles to potentially turn severe, but its rare. shingles can cause meningitis, and encephalitis, as well as spinal cord damage.
people who arnt sure about thier chickenpox immunity can ask thier doctors to do antibody titers(it doesnt detect dormant chickenpox in your ganglia though because theres no way to detect it outside of autopsy), your doctor maybe reluctant to administer the test though.
When my husband moved to Germany from Russia, he had no idea whether he was vaccinated as a child or not (he very likely was, but there weren’t records he was aware of and his mom died early). So he went to the doctor’s to ask for titers. They said they could test that but he would have to pay out of pocket, and offered to just vaccinate him again for free. He went through all the children’s vaccines - including chicken pox, which wasn’t around when we were kids (90s). It is the simpler, more accessible, and cheaper alternative to titers.
Thank you for sharing that — especially with it being personal information. Like your husband, I moved to Germany and cannot check my vaccination history — at least not easily, being estranged from my relatives. Coming from Spain and having been born in the late 90s, I very likely received all the usual vaccines. Still, I’ve been wondering what I could do about this for years. I will ask my Hausärztin sometime.
When my cousin had chicken pox my mom popped her finger in my cousin’s mouth, then popped that finger in my and my brother’s mouths.
I was a kid in the 90s and while pox was already somewhat of old sounding word, it feels especially archaic to realize that kids don’t have to go through any poxes anymore.
Pro Life only until it’s born, then fuck that Life
The future seems not that bad now that I know we won’t be seeing an entire generation of Republicans
We’ve been thinking that for three generations and somehow they’re still here
They are children! They are victims here.
Edit: the fact this got downvoted, the fact there are people who will gladly punish children for the actions of their parents, what a hellish world we live in.
I spent SO MUCH TIME during my pediatrics clinical rotation explaining vaccines to new parents. In some cases, I sat there for a literal hour and debunked myths and conspiracy theories in order to get the parents to consider maybe doing a delayed vaccination schedule. I’m a medical student, so my time is basically worthless and I viewed this as a good use of it, but it was so incredibly frustrating to have to do over and over.
For other folks who know anti-vax parents (new or not), here’s the best line of argument I came up with:
Vaccines have been around for a very long time now, and the only changes we’ve made to them recently is to make them better and safer. The preservatives in them like the mercury compound are perfectly safe, but we’ve still worked hard to improve the manufacturing process to minimize the need for those preservatives and make the vaccines as pure as possible.
Vaccines are made of little fragments of the virus or bacteria, or a modified, significantly weaker version of the pathogen to give your child’s immune system a chance to see it before the real thing shows up. It’s like giving your child’s immune system a wanted poster or a punching bag to practice on because it has to make special tools to fight each different pathogen.
The reason we load kids up with so many vaccines in the first year or two of life is because their immune systems are still growing and it’s an optimal time to introduce things for it to prepare for, and we want to give them some protection of their own before the antibodies from mom run out around 6 to 12 months of life.
We have decades of data showing that vaccines are safe and effective, and the complications and side effects are so minor compared to the problems that can come from the disease. And it’s usually around 1000:1 ratio of complications from the disease versus complications from the vaccine, and the vaccine complications are almost always less severe than the complications from the disease.
If you refuse vaccination for your child for reasons besides an anaphylactic allergy to the ingredients, you are gambling your child’s life with most of these diseases, and it would have been an entirely preventable death. Vaccines are very hard to make and we have prioritized making vaccines for the diseases that kill children. We don’t bother making vaccines for things that are just a nuisance, so the vaccines we have exist for very good reasons. For the most famous example, measles has about 5 different ways it can kill your child that are impossible to treat or prevent once they have it, and many ways to cause permanent damage. The known and most common side effects of the measles vaccine are pretty mild and can be easily treated with medications we have available.
Edit: Fuck it. I’ve decided that I’m going to use some of my copious (/s) free time writing a children’s and parents’ book about vaccine safety with this argument. I will self publish if I have to and give it out in family medicine and pediatric clinics if it kills me.
We had our cats in for their annual checkups a few years back, and the vet noted they were due for their vaccinations. The way she said it, we could hear she was bracing for an argument. I wonder if someone had laid into her about it earlier that day.
We, of course, had the vaccinations done, much to her relief.
My explanation is simpler: “The body learns how to fight diseases by eating killed viruses. A vaccine gives you dead viruses, so your body can learn without having to get hurt first. A measles party uses living viruses, so your kid might suffer death or worse.”
Then show them the results.
Probably not accurate in detail, but hopefully good enough. If not, then the brevity will let you move onto someone who hasn’t abandoned their brain.
They see that rash as not that scary, and the rash is honestly the mildest part of the disease. Measles can cause encephalitis (brain swelling) and kill the child, it can cause pneumonia and kill the child, they can recover from the illness and be completely fine for a few years until the virus reactivates and their entire central nervous system becomes intractably inflamed and they seize until they die. And there’s nothing we can do about any of those complications besides things like IV fluids or ventilatory support because there are no antiviral medications effective against measles, so we just have to hope the child’s immune system wins.
Anti-vax parents should have their kids taken away.
The problem with that is that there are already too many children in need of good homes and some of these parents are very good in every other respect. The people who push anti-vax stuff need to be made into public examples, but the rank-and-file believers are usually just well-meaning dupes.
Another worth noting is if an antivaxxer says “we don’t know what they put into vaccines”, respond with “we don’t know what they put in painkillers and yet you take them no problem”. Nine times out of ten, these antivaxxers would take painkillers willy nilly without question. Saying this makes them question their line of thought. Heck, the same could be said just about anything. We don’t know what cooks in restaurants put into the food we ordered, and yet there is no significant movement advocating to stop ordering takeaways or eating outside of home.
respond with “we don’t know what they put in painkillers and yet you take them no problem”
But we do know exactly what goes into both.
Saying this makes them question their line of thought.
They don’t think. There is no line of thought. They just react to memes with brainless conformity.
…except that we do know what gets put in every medication. Every ingredient has to be registered and tested, and if they change the formulation at all, they have to test it again to make sure it’s safe.
The sad thing about debunking is that you need to have direct contact with the person under a delusion to build rapport and need to be quite knowledgeable about the topic, but planting the the delusion can be done at a large scale by any eloquent doofus with time to spare. It’s so frustrating.
It is always harder to build than to destroy.
It’s definitely a starfish situation. You won’t be able to save all of them, but you can make a difference to each individual that you help. It’s my guiding principle in medicine for everything from preventative care to resuscitation. I can’t save every patient, but I can do my best to help the one in front of me, and previous failures do not prevent future successes.
Doing the good fight
Please do
500,000 people a year used to die from polio every year. Death. Death is the side affects of not getting vaccinated.
Sorry for the kids, but I have simply given up to care about the members of this suicide cult.
As a former child (read: captive) of ultra conservative christian fuckwits, I implore you to try to care. It’s not those kids’ fault they have shitty stupid parents.
So arrest and jail her
I was a kid when they were first developing the vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella (we called it German measles). So my brothers and I all got every one of them. I remember being sick with them, and with one of the measles types (don’t remember which) I was so sick I though I was gonna die. I’ll never forget lying there, even thinking of certain things made me puke (or dry heave) so I had to concentrate on not thinking of anything. I remember puking so hard it came out my nose. One of my brothers was so sick, his fever was so high, they took him to the hospital.
Do parents really want to put their children through this instead of a shot? WTF
Just some of the ones that were vaccinated against measles.
I think the problem is fear. Parents are genuinely scared of vaccines because of the misinformation that’s been spread around.
Long before there was a vaccine, I developed meningitis from a measles infection. Luckily my parents weren’t idiots and took me to the hospital. I ran a high fever, had febrile convulsions and hallucinated. Afterwards, I was over-sensitive to light for at least a week. Anyone who would inflict that on a kid belongs in prison or worse.
I assume it’s more about the parents high-fiving each other over really sticking it to the man or something. It’s just one of the results of rampant anti-intellectualism. The kids are just a random collateral in that circlejerk of those brake pads of evolution.
I don’t think it’s that. I think they’ve been brainwashed by anit-vax propaganda into truly being afraid of vaccines, combined with not understanding how severe these diseases are and how serious the consequences of not vaccinating can be.
We need to make it a priority to teach critical thinking skills in schools.
The scary thing is that it is hard to put the lid back on the bottle. If you try to tell them the facts they will see it as just more government brain washing.
I don’t really have much of an answer
should be child abuse
Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids
They should have their skulls kicked in before even thinking of having children
Lack of sex ed and no access to family planning services creates a whole bunch of idiots breeding more idiots
Thanks, conservative Christians, for decades of public instruction in abstinence only, for cultural supremacy of purity culture (I’m thinking specifically of the early 90s/00s where churches were all teaching the same curriculum and so many of the hottest celebrities all said they were waiting for marriage).
Knowing nothing about how relationships should work, how to navigate emotional problems effectively, or what red flags to look out for has sure made relationships and communities stronger, all across the country.
We need to fight back against the Christians. We have suffered under their oppression long enough
“Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.”
It’s pretty normal to demonize parents who abuse children.
You can’t cure stupidity…
This is why Republicans are stupid, a vaccine is a controlled and safe measles exposure with some risk that is 1 in a 100. You are doing the same thing with measles parties but more reckless dangerous levels of infection and putting your kid at risk of death like 1/15 if you send them to the measles parties.
1 in 100 is ridiculously overstating the serious risks, borderlining on misinformation. You are not doing the same thing with measles parties at all
Here are the risks of the mmr vaccine
Death: literally 1 in a million. These are typically due to anaphylaxis. In much rarer cases underlying immune disorders are triggered, underlying neurological conditions such as encephalitis are triggered, or very severe thrombocytopenia occurs. The majority of cases of thrombocytopenia induced by the vaccine (which is still astoundingly rare) are not nearly this severe and are correctable
Anaphylaxis: literally 1 in a million
Febrile seizures: between 1 in 3000 and 1 in 4000
Thrombocytopenia, a low platelet count: 1 in 40,000. Again, most cases are not fatal
Mild swelling of the glands similar to mumps: 1 in 1000
Mild side effects like rash or fever though? About 5%
Now to contrast:
If you catch measles you have about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying. This is in America, the risk is higher in less developed countries and countries where vaccinations rates are lower (and thus pockets of America where vaccination rates are low may see higher death rates). This is because of the potential risk of developing pneumonia and encephalitis
People who are anti vaccination do not understand medicine at all and do understand the most basic statistics. The fact of the matter is vaccines can and do cause harm. There is no getting around that fact. But the chance of you encountering the harm from vaccines is astronomically lower than the risk of of encountering harm from the diseases they are protecting you from.
To put it quite simply: if you vaccinate your child with the mmr vaccine they have a 1 in a million chance of dying. If you do not and they catch measles they have a 1 in a thousand chance of dying. If you purposely infect them with measles you should be charged with child abuse.
One other devastating reason to vaccinate, particularly against measles: measles can give your immune system amnesia. All that precious “natural immunity” that these ghouls profess? You can just fucking LOSE it and have to relearn how to fight off previous infections. It’s a goddamned factory reset to day one, but without mommy’s antibodies you got in utero, nor from breast milk. Unless you’re Robin Arryn of the Vale from Game of Thrones.
You know more about it than I do.
Well, that is certainly one way to vax a community against most contagious diseases. And I will admit that it’s better than not vaccinating at all. But not by much. The standard vaccine protocol would be cheaper and more effective.
Damned fool of an idiot.
It’s actually worse because measles infection wipes out your immunity for other infections. Not to mention that even if you don’t die, 40% of people with measles infections end up needing hospitalization.
Also it could lead to a mutation. Not sure how robust the measles vaccine is, but technically possible to produce something new.
It’s already killed one child, just for context.
