By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog
This is PART SEVEN of a multi-part series on an important topic, Save Jerseyans.
Click here for Part One (You’re Kidding, Right?), here for Part Two (Snake Oil and Politics), here for Part Three (Vaccinations or Communicable Diseases), here for Part Four (Herd Immunity and Unvaccinated), here for Part Five (Who are the Anti-Vaxxers?), AND here for Part Six (Free Choice-Based Anti-Vaxxer Opposition) if you missed’em…
Diseases Are Safe – It’s Vaccines that Kill You!!!
Other anti-vaxxer arguments center on allegedly dangerous ingredients in vaccines or how modern sanitation practices render us safe from disease.
Of course, no parent wants to see their child given noxious chemicals disguised as medicine, which is what many anti-vaxxers allege is the sum and substance of vaccines. Others swear up and down that infectious diseases aren’t a real danger, while vaccines are killers. Try telling that to the families of the 145,700 people killed by measles in 2013, or to the 15.6 million who were prevented from getting the measles by vaccines from 2000-2013.
There are hundreds of vaccines that contain scores of ingredients for anything from the flu to polio. But the ingredient focus is usually on such things as aluminum, formaldehyde, preservatives and other substances. In almost every instance, however, those ingredients are in miniscule quantities smaller than what a human being ingests naturally by eating food or drinking water, or self-manufactures in a normal bodily process. In other words, vaccines aren’t artificial test-tube creations cooked up in a mad, big-pharma scientist’s lab. Their ingredients are so ordinary, every lay person can understand what they are and how they work – if, that is, they bothered to take the time to learn about them rather than panic at the outset.
For a comprehensive step-by-step visual display of vaccines, how they work, how they’re manufactured, their risks – less than one serious allergic reaction for every 1 million MMR doses – and more, go here.
One Internet clearing house for “science-based” vaccine information without any “nonsense or pseudoscience” lists dozens of search-engine topics related to vaccines, their ingredients, their safety and debunked myths.
None of this, however, prevents anti-vaxxers from continuing to traffic in vaccine myths, half-truths and innuendo. One writer contends, as the title of her piece suggests, that they see themselves as above criticism. In “Vaccine Injury Stories: The Sacred Cows of the Internet?” she writes:
I never want to tell a grieving parent how they should think, feel or behave, and I never want to diminish their feelings or experiences. Many of these parents were absolutely convinced that their child was injured by vaccines. But a lot of the information simply didn’t stack up. In these accounts, there were misunderstandings about dosage and toxicity, medical misconceptions, huge leaps or gaps in logic, and attempts to explain what happened in terms they didn’t seem to comprehend were simply implausible or impossible.
To question their truths or ask how they know what they claim to be gospel is a factual reality is a one-way ticket to getting your head bitten off. Like overly-paranoid Rob Lowe from the TV commercial, they’re convinced that somebody’s out to get them.
Are they willing to forego all medicine, all modern health care because of associated risks? Somehow I think not.
