I think she deserves a lot of credit for publicly confessing her fuckup so that others can benefit.

Nothing so liberates the heart as when a fool awakens from his* folly.


*her

I bet you got a couple of rocks and a bone for her, amirite.


Also, needs 'not ironic' tag

Who needs vaccines when you've got Team Flakes?

An anti-vaxxer that looks like Graham Elliot in a wig? I'd rather the dude in the "rude waitress" clip.

XD

yes!

I am outraged at your insensitivity to Stupid-Americans.

Not believing in reality can be very harmful to everyone affected by your decisions.

It's ironic to HER, because she believed some idiotic conspiracy theory.

I wonder what the correlation is between anti-vaxxers who won't vaccinate their kids vs. ones that won't vaccinate their pets. I mean, do they worry Fido will get Autism?

Dogs don't have souls to be poisoned and killed by flu shots; that's why they can't get autism. Come on, man, we have extensive scientific evidence going back over a century to back this up.

She meant it was ironic that they all got it right after she wised up started vaccinating.

Alanis was Canadian as well. The ability to smell the asparagus smell in pee is genetic. Interestingly, many Australians lack this gene. My theory is that something similar is true of irony and Canadians.

I'm willing to bet her change of heart coincided with one of her children showing symptoms of something worse than the flu. In that case, the rest were already doomed, and it was less irony and more "too little, too late."

I will give her the most credit I can and say that at least she has extracted her head from her own ass, admits to being a shitty parent, and is trying to warn other fools to avoid this fate.

Christ, so much of the anti-vaxx movement reminds me of a certain well-worn fantasy trope: The ancient evil force, sealed away in bygone times by some legendary hero, and unleashed again to plague humanity (literally, here!) by skeptical or greedy opportunists heedless of all the warnings.

I've ranted about this before, but I've always felt blaming Jenny McCarthy specifically for anti-vaxxers is silly. There were tons of these people way before anyone even knew who Jenny McCarthy was. Hell, an autism activist woman came to my high school, years before Jenny McCarthy's views were out there, and told us all vaccines gave her kid autism and that nobody should get vaccines because humans just "evolved" immunity to those diseases that we coincidentally developed vaccines for.

There are actual doctors pushing this anti-vaxx shit. Bill Maher is anti-vaccine as well. He gets nominated for science awards by atheist orgs. But nobody's demanding he be removed from television (well except me, but only because I can't stand Bill Maher...) I mean, if you're taking your medical advice from D-List celebrities from the 90's, you've got bigger problems.

magnesium beat me to it; it's true that there were other doctors who said the same thing. But there's an emphasis on "were" here. Basically, your two spokespeople for anti vaxx are the guy who is no longer allowed to practice medicine at all, and the gal who I learned to masturbate to. I feel bad for the kids and I'm glad they'll be alright, but they're probably too young to know how to even spell "vaccine." Hell, I had to spell check it just then. You've got the choice to do anything you want to do as a parent, but this is unfortunately the cost. In Oregon, we don't have flouride in the water. There's arguments for and against it, but it was my parents' generation who voted for it, and my teeth paid the price, to the point where I visited the dentist when I was in Wisconsin and he handed me a pamphlet about dangers of meth on the way out. I know there's a difference: Autism can't be cured the way that teeth can be cleaned or replaced. I grew up with a little brother who has autism, and that's why I do the work I do today. While I may have not gotten flouride, I was given every vaccine known to man in 1982, as was my older brother in 1977. He graduated from Yale and I from UW Madison. My little brother is more of a rockstar than either of us. While there's no "cure," there are services for people with developmental disabilities, which I'm sure you're all aware of, like Special Olympics and other integration programs, both of which I work for. Because of these, my younger brother actually makes more money than myself or my older brother, so fuck these people using "autism" the same way as "it'll turn you into a vampire/zombie hybrid." Seriously, fuck those people who think that people with developmental disabilities don't have the same opportunity to thrive as the rest of us.

And the thing that nobody really considers: most of the anti-vaxx stuff's coming out of California, but it's a popular trend in Oregon too, at least Portland. And in both cases they seem to be affecting middle to high class income families. The kind of people who are young and successful, and probably go out and get drinks after work because they can afford to do so. They fuck a guy and get pregnant, but it's not like you necessarily know if you're pregnant immediately. So continuing that lifestyle until you know won't reverse what you've already done to the fetus that's growing inside of you. But you don't think about that: responsible adults only give up drinking once they find out, not when the child is conceived. FAS is the most obvious cause, but other defects like down syndrome and autism can also be caused by alcohol in utero. That's why you don't see as many people in poor parts of the world with kids with autism. At least that's my theory.

"mom, we made a decision: studies have shown that nursing homes cause depression, both in parents and their children, so here's a loaded pistol. You'll be staying in the basement now. If you miss, the walls are made on concrete so you can always bang your head against the wall until you bleed out."

-Merry Christmas! XOXO

That's really what's at the heart of the anti-vaccine movement. It's people making a (possibly subconscious) determination that they'd rather risk killing their child, and other people's children, with a preventable disease than risk having to care for an autistic child for the rest of their life.

It's a deeply selfish and shitty belief.