3 Things About Disease Rights Advocacy

I don’t write here as often as I should. Unless there’s some great big bomb I’m ready to drop, I can’t really muster up the energy to wax scientifical. That’s why I’m trying something new. I’m going to start posting whatever runs through my head no matter how seemingly insignificant the idea is. Quality may result from quantity. Who knows? 

Other than schoolwork and my attempts to learn taxidermy, I’ve been way preoccupied with the Disneyland measles outbreak lately. Well, the mad scramble from anti-vaxxers is really what’s been keeping me entertained. That ugly underbelly of the pro-disease movement has been exposed, and every fear/worry I had regarding them has been justified.

A few examples of what I mean:

“Measles is just a mild illness.” 

The first time I saw this, I was taken aback. No one can really think this can they? I’ll be damned if that isn’t the battle cry of the repugnant. But I guess to a group of people who fear autism like my dog fears the vacuum cleaner, their perspectives on ear infections, encephalitis, high fevers, diarrhea, deafness, pneumonia, and death can be a little… skewed. There’s duck-calls like “Dr. Bob” dispensing medical knowledge like diseases are the status quo, so I can almost understand where the ignorance comes from. Almost.

“Vaccines aren’t 100% effective.”

Neither are seat belts, condoms, or parachutes. I honestly can’t think of a single risk prevention measure that is 100% effective; that’s probably because such a thing doesn’t exist in the real world. That being said, 90% effectiveness is a whole hell of a lot better than taking no precautionary measures at all.

These parasites, and that’s what they are, leech off of herd immunity, benefiting from the protective shield we’re providing for them, completely oblivious to the fact that without us there’d be pandemic after pandemic. Thanks to their willful ignorance, that herd immunity has been compromised, and these ingrates have the gall to point the finger at those of us who made an effort to protect our neighbors. Which brings me to…

“You take care of your kids, and I’ll take care of mine.”

First of all, fuck you. Secondly, I don’t like sick kids. I don’t like hurt kids. I really don’t like dead kids. If there’s something I can do to make sure those three things never exist, you can bet your ass that I’m going to do it. Apparently, the plague preservation society doesn’t have much of a problem with seeing sick and dying children. The kids aren’t theirs, so fuck ’em. I mean, obviously the 2 in 1000 odds of dying from measles are much better than the 1 in a million chance of a vaccine injury. That’s how it works, right — the smaller the number the smaller the risk?

Whatever happened to “It takes a village”? The selfish stupidity that comes from these people makes me so angry that I have a hard time forming words, but I’m going to try. To be so flippant about the suffering of a child is something I just can not understand. I like to joke around sometimes and offer remote psych diagnoses but I really do wonder if a lot of these people are sociopaths. I don’t know if I’d feel better if that was the case. Maybe I should just hope the ones who say such things are incredibly stupid.

This is the kind of elitist idiot that’s putting the rest of us at risk.

There’s no real conclusion to offer; I just needed to do this for cathartic reasons. Maybe I’ll get better and start posting more than once every two or three weeks. I’m at least going to make an attempt. Until then…