Sunday, 26 September 2010

The Changing Face of Anti-Vax























Plus ca change, huh?







  1. I'm still not sure why one is allowed to send one's kid to school without having been vaccinated, at least without a doctor's note. If a parent wants to put their family at risk by not having their children vaccinated, I suppose that's their choice; I can't see letting children into a public school without a doctor's note verifying they have all their shots or giving a sound medical reason why they can't be vaccinated. And while it upsets me that some kids would be kept out of school, that's a far smaller ill than putting everyone else's kids' health at risk.

    It is depressing yet darkly amusing that the same arguments against vaccination get totted out over time but the diseases afflicting people are being reduced or eliminated. If Big Pharma just wanted to keep us sick all the time, why is smallpox gone along with its vaccine? Why did they make polio practically disappear when they could still be selling leg braces and crutches and iron lungs? And if Big Pharma is secretly behind all this, why do so many people know about it? Seems like a pretty incompetent conspiracy if you ask me...

  2. Sorry to be picky, but quite a lot of vaccines use live, attenuated organisms (or, in the case of the smallpox vaccination, a related but organism of low pathogenicity). I don't think you can say that "inoculation" and "vaccination" are different things. The words "vaccine" and "vaccination" were coined (some say by Pasteur) in honour of Jenner - "vacca" being latin for "cow" (and a reference to the natural host of the cowpox virus).

  3. Oh, and people who want to know more might find this page of interest:

  4. In this age of evidence based science, I think it's all well and sound to class anti-vaccination as a form of conspiracy theory.