@cstross People who are anti-vaccination for whatever fruitloops reason need to spend some quality time in old churchyards looking at monuments to dead children put up bereft parents.
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@cstross RFK jr, like Wakefield, is a poxbottle!
And his "vaccines cause autism" nonsense is basically old folklore about changelings in a new guise.
https://sunkencastles.com/2025/10/27/a-long-history-of-ableism-the-changeling-narrative/
@cstross If I may be allowed a small rant.
What shits me is that this nonsense doesn't stay in the US. These folk fund anti-vax messaging across the world.
So, a sole health worker in remote Australia has to combat targeted anti-vax propoganda funded by US organisations, and increasingly by the US government. Some US organisations simply pay elders to betray their communities' best interests. The local clinic nurse doesn't always succeed in winning against the powerful, and in some remote communities old diseases have come back.
These communicable diseases make unusable the sole medical clinic for hundreds of kilometres.
I'm sorry to hear this. I'm old enough to have seen polio and making vaccinations parent-choice is raw stupidity.
But why is this happening? Yes POTUS and JFK-Jr pushing it has raised exposure to another level. But why are people rushing to embrace the idea? And where are the voices pushing back?
Are people getting more stupid? Or are we lost without Ann Landers and a few voices of reason that the public trusts?
It's eugenics. The rich will still get vaccines for their kids, while the poor will be denied vaccines, care, and coverage.
@cstross I am not a medical professional, nor do I wish to play devil's advocate, but common sense tells us that at the beginning of the 20th century, hygiene standards and knowledge of medicines were much lower, so it is difficult to assess the impact of one factor or another on child mortality.
@gwenh Not just that: overcrowding was rife to an extent that's largely forgotten today. 20 people sleeping in the same room.
@cstross I mean, Polio is a disease I am very interested in. The vaccine came shortly before I was born, so I was one of the generation who felt very fortunate to have it.
And my wife had an aunt who had been paralysed for life by Polio. I knew her - she was one of the very lucky ones. She lived. She was able to have a fairly normal life - married and had children.
I lived at a time when vaccines were saving so many lives. So many thousands of lives.
And this fuckbrained heap of scum wants to turn all that back. The sooner he rots in hell, the better.
@cstross Unfortunately, there is nothing that will convince vaccine skeptics.
I once watched the BBC programme "Unvaccinated" by Hannah Fry, who meets seven unvaccinated people in an experiment.
She showed them the evidence, they slowly started to believe the evidence, or said that they did, but they remained skeptics at the end of the programme.
@cstross wow, what a moron - we had to monitor our sewage systems and proactively vaccinate children to get rid of the damn thing.
I remember growing up with kids my age wearing thick metal frames around their legs because of the disease.
Don't see them anymore because we eradicated it.
Get rid of the idiots soon guys!
There are only two kinds of person who believes in eugenics: those who think it applies to people they don't like, but not to them, and …
Sorry, I'm wrong. There is only one kind of person who believes in eugenics.
@cstross Well, one way to improve the GDP per capita…
@cstross If you want to reverse the demographic transition, you have to kill a lot of infants.
If you don't reverse the demographic transition, patriarchy goes away.
("The environment produces the organism" is always the case; other things are the case, too, but what you can have is constrained by the environment which exists, not which could exist. And for humans, cites are an environment and culture is an environment.)
Anti-vax is a "kill babies, keep patriarchy" movement.
@graydon So, a death cult.
@cstross Not precisely; they're not about generalized dying, they're willing to kill a lot of kids to maintain their status.
Can't enjoy that status if they're dead.
(Real death cults tend to be powerless people who want everyone to die as a means of escaping their circumstances. There's certainly some death cult members getting sucked into the grift but even those are mostly built on histrionics about a lack of white supremacy rather than material misery as such.)
They're aligned with all the other anti-human movements on the right (anti immigration, forced birth, fuck everything to fulfil the prophesies in Revelations, cops do murders whenever they like, healthcare for profit, prisons for profit) so death cult is a convenient shorthand.
Whenever a new policy question comes up that hasn't been assigned to Woke or MAGA yet, MAGA will pick the option with more death a statistically significant amount of the time.
@cstross RFucK Jr is a pedophile-protecting infanticider.
@cstross I wonder when the rest of the world will start requiring USians to have proof of vaccination before entering the country
@cstross callous and selfish people like the MAHA folks need callus and selfish responses. Its all they understand. One such response in the 'my tax dollars range' : It is my tax dollars they are wasting. Why should my tax dollars pay to treat you when you could have been vaccinated? My tax dollars paid for that vaccine, why are you wasting it. Its not the government, it's my tax dollars. Etc blah blah.
@cstross My stepfather had polio. As a child he spent a year in isolation, thinking he would die. For the rest of his life he has had a hunched back and almost no use of his left arm and hand. He would tell you he was one of the lucky ones.
@cstross Ironically, this is going to be that white genocide that previously existed only in their broken little minds. Just like the cabal of paedophiles, the corrupt swamp, and fascist leaders coming to power it was projection all along.
@cstross better access to nutrition, housing, sanitation maternity care and drinking water also occurred at these times.
@cstross Reminder that in industrialized countries, for some diseases, mortality had already dropped before vaccines were even a thing.
@jpages Massive public education campaigns and immediate isolation of outbreak patients put the brakes on. As did better living conditions (it's hard to isolate in a slum with eight people sleeping to a room; also hard to isolate when there are ten kids in a family).
There would be more kids left disabled or permanently harmed from these diseases, even if they did survive.
I've heard these 'common sense' views before but they're unscientific - the immune system doesn't get stronger from exposure to disease. It doesn't need to be exercised.
@cstross Trump is already the most prolific mass-murderer in history. They should give him an award. Something like a golden swaztika.
@cstross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Alexander_(polio_survivor)
Considering he died not that long ago means there are polio survivors probably still floating around, so it isn’t that long ago polio was killing people. I also remember my mom talking about her mom taking them and standing in line for the vaccine when it came out because she knew how deadly it was.
@cstross …and infant mortality is already much higher in the US than in any other comparable country.
@cstross We improve with education. Our breed is HUMAN. UGH!!! People can be so evil! We are one species, on race.
I have this picture saved to my phone for just that reason
@cstross When I was growing up in Madrid in the late 60s, there were still lots of very young people around who had contracted and were scarred for life from polio.
My friend was about 3 years older than me. She had contracted polio at the age of 5. It had attacked her spine, and she had to wear a metal brace 24/7 around her torso and chest to keep her upright so her body wouldn't double over and suffocate her by collapsing her lungs.
It was incredibly painful. She moved slowly and jerkily...
@cstross Not to put a too fine point on that, but people in iron lungs also don’t breed easily.
Pure eugenics.
@cstross People who are anti-vaccination for whatever fruitloops reason need to spend some quality time in old churchyards looking at monuments to dead children put up bereft parents.
@Infoseepage
Literally, just go to ancestry.com and map out your own family a couple generations back and find all the great uncles and aunties you don’t have because THEY ALL DIED OF CHILDHOOD DISEASES THAT THE US ADMINISTRATION IS INSANELY SUGGESTING WE DROP, LIKE A BUNCH OF GODDAMNED HOMICIDAL MANIACS #CantMakeThisShitUp #SureGoAheadKillMeAndMyEntireFamilyWhyDontYou #ActuallyNoYouCanGoFuckOffAndDieYourselves
@cstross That means they’ll need even more white babies. Don’t these people talk to each other?
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