Anti Vaxxer Quotes

holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other. Sort of like vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality. That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.

Don’t be an anti-vaxxer.

for example, the aristocracy under Stalinism, the Jews under Nazism, the virus, and, later, the anti-vaxxers during the coronavirus crisis—and at the same time offers a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, there is a real chance that all the free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object and there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.

His sigh is frustrated. “Of course there are. People who think they know better than thousands of years of research and insist on risking their children.” “Like human anti-vaxxers,” I mutter. I guess some things, like stupidity, cross the species barrier.

You believe that, Holly thinks. You believe it to your very soul, because you’re a holder-onner, and holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other. Sort of like vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers.

In fact, the CDC would later implicitly acknowledge the system’s value when it admitted in June that the mRNA vaccines could cause myocarditis—a potentially serious heart problem—in young men. Side effect reports from VAERS formed the core of the agency’s analysis.37 Yet even after that finding, the stories dismissing the value of the VAERS reports went on.38 I am not an “anti-vaxxer.

One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.

Indeed, a culture of scientism helps produce a culture that also rejects genuine scientific authority. The scientism studied in these pages, by falsely trading on an authority it does not wield, helps to sow a wider skepticism and cynicism about the 'elite' voices of scientists as such. A disturbing increase in science denial (e.g. conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) is in a mutually supporting dialectic with the absolute scientism of a Pinker or a Dawkins. Although they have not yet realized it, figures like Pinker and Dawkins, far from defending science, undermine it by overpromising and exaggerating its authority. Ultra-Darwinists and biblical literalists are dance partners

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

A crisis actor? It is the twenty-first century and we still have to deal with flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and moon landing truthers. This is what you get when guns are more important than books—a nation of sociocultural primitives.

There wasn’t only censorship but purposeful misinformation. It’s likely you heard ivermectin is a kind of “horse-paste” deplorables and other anti-science, anti-vaxxers were eagerly ingesting and then getting horribly sick, and that hydroxychloroquine is some weird poisonous chemical that comes from fish-tanks that Donald Trump foolishly took when he got COVID.

If the anti-vaxxers are conspiracy nuts, which they sure are, so are the politicians, who keep dumping billions and billions of dollars in defense contracts out of sheer primitive insecurity instead of working to organize peace.

In late August 2021, NIH, FDA, and CDC launched an innovative new campaign to slander ivermectin as a “horse dewormer” that only deluded foolhardy nincompoops would consume. Picking up on those themes, The Independent asked, “Ivermectin: Why Are US Anti-Vaxxers Touting a Horse Dewormer as a Cure for COVID?

Conspiracy theories have been multiplying insanely for years now, ever more ridiculous and far-fetched. Chemicals in contrails. Anti-vaxxers. Climate-change deniers. And all those are almost precious compared to the toxic horror of the 9/11 and school-shooting truthers who reduce the worst nightmare of any parent’s life to fakery, and rip the survivors’ lives apart.

Logic evolved as a means of defending our passions in an argument. Most people reason to defend their position, not to change their minds or advance their understanding. “When it comes to sensational ideas, we’re like cats chasing a laser pointer. We’ll pounce on anything that’s shiny and new. Only unlike a cat, we can actually catch hold of these ideas. Then we turn and become like a dog with a bone, defending our newfound prize as though it were sacred. “Look at the madness during the pandemic. No one wants to be sick. No one wants to suffer. No one wants to die in agony. No one starts out as an anti-vaxxer, but there goes the red dot of that goddamn laser pointer. It’s racing along the carpet. Gotta chase it! “Somewhere along the line, there will be some vague point that appeals to our vanity, to the passions we already hold—and that’s all that’s needed to believe a lie. We become convinced against all logic to the contrary. We throw out any logic we don’t like. We have to. We have to justify the madness—not the logic, the passion! And the irony is, the smarter we think we are, the easier it is to be fooled. “We overestimate our own intelligence when it’s largely irrelevant. You don’t need a blistering IQ to drive a car, do the laundry, play golf or walk the dog. Regardless of how smart we think we are, we rarely use our intelligence to its full potential. And it makes no difference anyway. Our collective intelligence is far more important than any one individual’s intelligence. It doesn’t matter how smart someone is, anyone can own an iPhone, but no one person can build one from scratch.

Another YouTuber who won a seat in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in 2018 was Kim Kataguiri, one of the leaders of the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL, or Free Brazil Movement). Kataguiri initially used Facebook as his main platform, but his posts were too extreme even for Facebook, which banned some of them for disinformation. So Kataguiri switched over to the more permissive YouTube. In an interview in the MBL headquarters in São Paulo, Kataguiri’s aides and other activists explained to Fisher, “We have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.” They explained that YouTubers tend to become steadily more extreme, posting untruthful and reckless content “just because something is going to give you views, going to give engagement…. Once you open that door there’s no going back, because you always have to go further…. Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories in politics. It’s the same phenomenon. You see it everywhere.

Complaints like this were the quickest way to get under my skin. Nobody took history seriously. They thought math, English, and science were the only valuable subjects. A lack of taking history seriously was why we had Holocaust deniers and anti-vaxxers.

Ask the Aztecs and Incas whether or not they would have liked to have vaccines available to the. Oh, wait--you can't. They're dead. Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sand castles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today. If taking a moment to elaborate on that point will make this book unpopular with a large group of anti-vaxxers, that's ok. This feels like a good hill to die on. It's surely a better one than the Incas got.

So in the blazing hot months of late summer 2020, with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, the loose coalition of anti-vaxxers, anti-traffickers, anti-5G activists, COVID conspiracy theorists, anti-globalists, wellness advocates, terrified mothers, and crusaders for trafficked children hit the streets and began to march.

A rabid anti-vaxxer, Steele made near-daily assertions that COVID was a hoax. He made these claims right up to his last breath. Steele died from complications of the disease in August 2021.

Sometimes one side is completely wrong (like anti-vaxxers).

It is the twenty-first century and we still have to deal with flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and moon landing truthers. This is what you get when guns are more important than books—a nation of sociocultural primitives.

We will see in a later chapter that religious exemptions are rarely based on the teachings of any religion and often invite parents to lie.

...statistics can be deployed badly, or in bad faith. The often complex-looking equations and symbols of statistics can be used to communicate quickly and succinctly between those with statistical training, and they can be used to confuse, befuddle, and bully into belief those without.

Legal rulings have no bearing on scientific and medical truth. Like scientists, legal professionals are interested in finding the truth (well, at least sometimes). However, the means that the legal profession uses to arrive at decisions are different from those used in science.

In the past, the number of children diagnosed was lower. The change is mostly likely due to an improved definition and a better understanding of autism; greater access to resources for parents of autistic children, leading more to seek diagnosis; and wider access to medical care.

The diagnosis of autism increased from 1988 to 1999, by seven times, but the vaccination rate had remained relatively stable at about 95 percent.

Journalists fill very different social roles than those of scientists, and the press serves different roles than those of scientific institutions. Scientists and research institutions have motivations for communicating with the public that only partly overlap with those of journalists. From a scientist’s perspective, the function of media ought to be to disseminate scientific results accurately and in proportion to the strength of the evidence they have produced… Journalists, on the other hand, work to avoid the appearance of working for a “special interest.” The news media aim to entertain; warn of dangers and failures; and report, explain, or comment on events. Preventing disease is not one of these goals… Although desiring to only present factual information, a journalist with a deadline to deliver a story before the publication of a newspaper or the airing of television program may simply not have enough time to “get it right” because they interviewed the wrong people, missed important features, or were not able to follow up on sources. Long-form investigative journalism, such as Deer’s investigation of Wakefield’s conflicts of interest, can slowly fill these gaps.

Rarely do issues have “two sides” of equal scientific merit that deserve equal representation. Credentials alone mean little. Those representing themselves as scientists or physicians may well have doctorates, but they may also be speaking well outside their areas of expertise. The story of the little guy going up against an evil corporation may make for a compelling (and well-worn) narrative, but often the little guy is working with bad science.

Ableism has been defined as “the term used to describe the discrimination against and the exclusion of individuals with physical and mental disabilities from full participation and opportunity within society’s systems and activities.” Ableism is a useful lens through which to examine much of the rhetoric generated by the anti-vaccine movement as it pertains to autism.

On the social-media platform Twitter, fake-news stories propagate “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly” than true stories. False stories reached more people, jumped from more users, had greater success going viral, and were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than were true stories. Those who primarily consume news online are more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is a concern because 80 percent of internet users search for health information online.

… as of 2008 over half of the search results returned for “vaccine safety” and “vaccine danger” were inaccurate. About one-quarter of these websites aspire to claims of authority by imitating those of official organizations or by citing dubious literature, and many frame vaccination as a “debate” occurring within the medical community and offer “unbiased” information.

The word meme was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to draw an analogy between how genes can propagate in populations by evolution and how small units of ideas can propagate between people. Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes. (Richard Dawkins, according to Merriam-Webster)

In many ways science has not yet caught up to social media in its ability to disseminate information. Many scientists prefer traditional media sources. Our means of communicating scientific information are still mostly modeled after means of communication that are now largely dead.

Hundreds of millions of tweets are posted daily, and hundreds of millions of people use social-media platforms. Like it or not, these platforms have become the de facto means by which most nonscientists receive and access information about scientific discoveries. Internet communication can even lead to positive outcomes. Use of the internet increases positive attitudes about science overall, and access to science blogs can help address knowledge gaps across social classes.

The religions of the world are diverse, representing many different supernatural explanations for the nature of reality, beliefs, and practices, so it is difficult to make blanket statements about whether a religious objection to vaccination can ever accurately reflect a person’s religious beliefs. However, the majority of world religions don’t hold an objection to vaccination as actual official belief. Because many states allow for religious exemptions to vaccination, in effect, religious belief becomes a convenient scapegoat for vaccine objections.

The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. —Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Undervaccinated children are likely to be children whose parents want them to receive health care but cannot afford it, whereas unvaccinated children are likely to be children of parents with vaccine doubt. Indeed, the strongest predictors of vaccine exemptions in California are median household income, higher percentage of white race in the population, and private schools.

Rather than being low-information parents, these are parents who are, if anything, less selective in choosing the sources they get information from. Rather than using information arrived at through the scientific method, they have also incorporated information from websites, alternative health practitioners, and religious leaders.

Doing your own research isn’t a bad thing, so long as you use good sources.

Human life has always been stalked by disease. For bacteria, viruses, and parasites, our bodies and our cells are perfect incubators. Every life saved and every quantum of suffering avoided by a vaccine is the legacy of all the physicians and scientists who have ever devoted themselves to developing or disseminating these life-saving technologies. The anti-vaccination movement has worked its way into the public discourse, motivated by compassion and distrust of authority, experts, corporations, and governments.

The very presence of those who oppose vaccination are in that way a testament the effectiveness of vaccines.

When opposition to vaccination becomes attached to a person’s identity and values, contradictory information can feel like an attack on that identity and those values.

As a young journalist still building my reputation, it was mortifying and bewildering to be compared to Holocaust deniers and anti-vaxxers.

In September 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. She had been a liberal judge on the US Supreme Court, and her death gave President Trump the opportunity to nominate an anti-abortion member of the religious right as her replacement. I am not going to say that abortion is a good thing, but it is sometimes a necessary thing and in a free society a woman should be able to choose if she is going to have an abortion or not. In an ideal world, it would not be necessary for very many abortions ever to be carried out. So an ideal world is what legislators should be looking to create if they want to reduce the number of abortions.

She’d got into the anti-vaxxer stuff and kept saying how I’d wrecked Ethan because he had the MMR jab.