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.”
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:
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.
But we do know exactly what goes into both.
They don’t think. There is no line of thought. They just react to memes with brainless conformity.
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.
Counterpoint: putting two flat Lego pieces together.
500,000 people a year used to die from polio every year. Death. Death is the side affects of not getting vaccinated.
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 die 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.
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.