Replies

Where to begin?

First off, you talk about “slavery” and “breathtakingly imposing on the whole of society”, “the loss of human rights” and “despotism”, “totalitarian powers of the state and blinding people” with regards to vaccinations. I didn’t speak to that aspect, as to whether the “state” should force people to get vaccinated against their will or their religious or political beliefs. That is a whole other topic, worth discussing on its own merits, the pros and cons. I was only speaking to the reality that diseases like measles, a very highly contagious disease like measles, one rife with sometimes fatal complications is not at all innocuous or harmless. Measles was not long ago, before widespread vaccination programs, one of the leading causes of childhood deaths and miscarriages among pregnant women. Getting yourself and your family vaccinated not only protects yourself, it also protects others.

I will also tell you that I am probably more of the “libertarian” minded folks here at FR. But I do not see “libertarianism” or the extent of which I can as a free person exercise my individual rights as being completely unlimited or empowering me live in a complete vacuum and with no regard for my fellow citizens.

We have many laws that protect not our own safety and well being but also those of our neighbors.

For instance, you and I can’t legally operate a car on public roads that has no working brakes, windshield wipers, headlights or drive around on completely bald tires. You and I might own a house, own our own piece of property but we can’t dump garbage and human waste, dead animal carcasses in our front yards and along the street curb as this is a threat to not only our health but to the public health. Likewise I can’t operate my own unregulated nuclear power plant in my basement or run a chemical weapons lab in my bedroom, or a meth lab in my garage even if I’m the only one consuming the meth I produce because the risk that I might blow up not only my own house but the entire nieborhood and expose them to highly toxic chemicals is not just a personal risk. There are limits to individual freedoms even under the most libertarian of definitions; that being “I am free to do as I please as long as what I do causes no harm to or in any way limits the freedom of others.

Likewise, restaurants are subject to health inspections. You might think this is an imposition and on them running their business as they choose but unless you are able to and fully trained and knowledgeable and prepared to conduct your own health inspections every time you go out to eat, you are probably depending on some government imposed standards. That is not to say that all restaurants are 100% compliant 100% of the time, but the regulations and random inspections help keep such establishments in compliance and the penalties for not complying are correct.

Likewise food handlers have to pass tests on safe food handling and it used to be (not sure to what extent it still is) that all food preparers and handlers were subject to regular testing for hepatitis and cholera and TB, something that I think should be done as is done with people working in hospitals and clinics have and that they need to be vaccinated against communicable diseases that they are likely to come in contact with and pass on to others if they are not. Is this “statist” or “despotism” or is this common sense for the common good?

And as a “libertarian” while I might support your right and personal decision not to get vaccinated, as a “libertarian” I would also hold you accountable for your poor decision. If you or a member of your family comes down with measles or any other preventable but highly contagious and life threatening disease, I would support you and your family being forcibly quarantined under the force of law or the right of anyone to whom you transmitted your disease to, especially if they were not able to be vaccinated and you knew you were sick and highly communicable and didn’t care, to sue you for damages. See how the idea of unlimited personal freedom balanced with personal responsibility works? Contrary to what you might think, individual freedom is not a card blanche to do whatever you want without respect to the health, welfare and freedoms and rights of others.

As to me providing “Hyper-descriptive stories about experiencing illness”, you then go on to say “observed collapses in children by such vaccinations cannot actually be, in fact, caused by such vaccinations. Who is more callous, a medical researcher who decides that such child collapses are “statistically insignificant” given the amount of vaccinations, or the parents struggling to deal with the suddenly immune compromised or autistic child”.

Public health records regarding the deaths of children and adults dyeing from measles, polio, influenza, etc. are not pulled out of whole cloth, they are very well documented. You also can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim that one set of solid and very well documented data is just a statistical anomaly and then use another set of rather questionable data and highly Hyper-descriptive stories to be meaningful just because you dismiss one and not the other.

The Autism – vaccination link has been debunked over and over again but that doesn’t stop the anti-vaccine crowd from citing and repeating it as gospel.

And keep in mind that out of any large population of people, children included who receive any vaccination, there will be a very few who experience some sort of an adverse reaction. But the truth is that most of these “adverse” reactions are rather minor; these are things like swelling and redness at the injection site, a mild fever or aches and pains for a day or two, a few may pass out shorty after getting the vaccination but that usually has more to do with fear of needles and a psychological response rather than a physical one, a hysterical response rather than a physical one attributable to the vaccine, and a very, very few may suffer a more adverse reactions to the vaccination, they may have a hyper immune response or they may have some sort of allergic reaction and these can be serious and life threatening in a very few, but yes, “statically speaking” they are anomalies, outliers and the lives saved by vaccination programs are not negated by the very few who suffer some sort of negative effect.

I would go back once again to the modern automobile as an example. Sure we hear stories every once and a while about someone who died in an auto wreck because they couldn’t undo their seat belt when their car went under water or caught in fire or the seatbelt caused an internal injury. But overwhelmingly it has been proven time and time again that wearing seat belts has saved many more lives than the statistically very few that it cause a problem for. I for one am going to wear a seatbelt. If you don’t, fine with me, but don’t expect me to shed a tear for you if you are ejected through the windshield of your car and don’t expect me to pay for your hospitalization, long term care or your funeral.

The rest of your post is chock full of unscientific and hysterical nonsense and exDemMom is better to refute those than I am. But when you talk about “adjuvant-laden vaccinations” and vaccinations being “poisons” this tells me that you really have no idea what and of that even means or how vaccinations work, when you talk about vaccinations “keeping people sick” you really need to educate yourself and do some real research on the topic.

As far as your link “Bedrock of vaccination theory crumbles as science reveals antibodies not necessary to fight viruses” first of all this is from Mike Adam’s Natural News site, not exactly or even remotely a reputable site for scientific or medical news. And it is not because “big medicine” or “big pharma” is keeping him down, it is because it is pure junk science not even honest science. From the link you posted; “Bedrock of vaccination theory crumbles as science reveals antibodies not necessary to fight viruses” one of the comments was:

“A friend forwarded me this article and I was not sure if your analysis of that Harvard Medical School study was correct. I emailed the author, Prof. Uldrich H. von Andrian, to see if his study proved that vaccines were unnecessary. Here's his reply:

“Our study makes no such claims. The work in question has examined a "naive" response of mice to infection with a specific virus, VSV. All we showed is that the animals could survive this infection even if they lacked certain parts of the immune system that are usually activated by vaccines. However, the mice did get infected (i.e. they got sick) and they would get infected again if they were re-exposed to the same virus at a later time. Had they been vaccinated, the viral infection (i.e. sickness) would have been completely prevented. A vaccinated animal would have been protected against this virus for the rest of its life. That's the point of vaccination, one of the most significant and impactful advances in the history of medicine."

Websites like Natural News and dare I say, like a lot of Creationist websites, they take the findings and research papers of actual scientists but then cherry pick and take out of context what they think supports their POV while totally ignoring and willfully omitting that which from the very same paper, doesn’t.

And your other link from Gaia Health? Seriously? Gaia Health? The website that also posts “Economics Are Destroying the Earth: Stunning Video” - Gaia is being destroyed by an artificial construct called economics. We stand back and watch as those self-styled "scientists" of economics play games with figures to justify the destruction of everything. They use the term "externalities" for the ozone, biodiversity, aquifers, and all the rest of nature to pretend that the destruction..

Sure. OMG! Gaia is being destroyed by big pharma, GMO foods, Global Warming, nuclear energy, animal cruelty, and capitalism….did I forget any of the memes?