Tag: anti-vaxxers

Raise the price for those who still won’t get vaxxed

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‘The responsible majority of citizens are fed up to their locked-down ears with the anti-vax tail wagging the dog.’


Christian Dubé

Reason hasn’t worked. Statistics haven’t worked. Pleading, begging, scolding and shaming haven’t worked.

Those refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 are doing great harm to the majority of responsible citizens, to Canada’s health-care system, to the overburdened men and women who work in it.

It is their irresponsibility that is largely to blame for the restraints under which Canadians are currently required to live.

It is no surprise, then, and largely to be applauded, that exasperated jurisdictions from Quebec to countries in Europe have opted to raise the cost of demonstrably anti-social behaviour.

In Quebec, the province’s health minister Christian Dubé announced this past week that, as of Jan. 18, Quebecers will have to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to access provincial liquor and cannabis stores.

Excerpted from a statement by the Editorial Board of the Toronto STAR.

Anti-Vaxxers the latest loonies trying to undo pandemic protection

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The protest on Friday in Sacramento urging California’s governor to reopen the state resembled the rallies that have appeared elsewhere in the country, with crowds flocking to the State Capitol, pressing leaders to undo restrictions on businesses and daily life…but, the organizers were not militia members, restaurant owners or prominent conservative operatives. They were some of the loudest antivaccination activists in the country…

“One of the things that we’re finding is that the rhetoric is pretty similar between the anti-vaxxers and those demanding to reopen,” said Dr. Rupali J. Limaye, who studies behavior around vaccines at Johns Hopkins University. “What we hear a lot of is ‘individual self management’ — this idea that they should be in control of making decisions, that they can decide what science is correct and incorrect, and that they know what’s best for their child.”…

“There is a tremendous amount of cross-pollinization of ideas as these factions get to know each other,” said Devin Burghart, who runs the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights…For example, an adherent of QAnon, a group of conspiracy theorists, was among the first to spread the canard that Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, was behind the creation and spreading of the virus as a means to grab control over the global health system. People opposing mandatory vaccinations quickly picked up on that theme, and Mr. Gates has become a new boogeyman of the far right.

RTFA. Please. The loonies are drawn to each other like spawning grunion. The numbers impress the average politician who ain’t about to spend time on sophisticated analysis or conscientious solutions. It will take informed citizens – as usual – to hold Congressional noses to the grindstone.

Over 34,000 cases of measles in last two months in Eastern Europe

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❝ More than 34,000 people across Europe caught measles in the first two months of 2019, with the vast majority of cases in Ukraine, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday as it urged authorities to ensure vulnerable people get vaccinated.

❝ The death toll among 34,300 cases reported across 42 countries in the WHO’s European region reached 13, with the virus killing people in Ukraine – which is suffering a measles epidemic – as well as in Romania and Albania. The risk is that outbreaks may continue to spread, the WHO warned.

❝ Measles is a highly contagious disease that can kill and cause blindness, deafness or brain damage. It can be prevented with two doses of an effective vaccine, but – in part due to pockets of unvaccinated people – it is currently spreading in outbreaks in many parts of the world including in the United States, the Philippines and Thailand…

There is no specific antiviral treatment for measles, and vaccination is the only way to prevent it, the WHO said. Most cases are in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people.

And if the anti-vaxxers get their political way, we will return to the days of my childhood. Every spring my fellow students would gather in the schoolyard first warm day – look around to see who died or was unable to resume school from one or another disease.

And then we waited for polio in the summer.

Deliberate disinformation aids ignorant measles outbreaks

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❝ A large measles outbreak in Washington state shows no sign of abating.

According to the State Department of Health, there are now at least 54 cases of the illness, all but one of which were located in Clark County, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. Directly to the south, the Oregon Health Authority has reported at least four cases. Within Clark County, the vast majority of diagnoses are of children 10 years old or younger.

❝ Measles — an airborne virus that can lead to lung infections, brain damage, and death in the worst cases — was responsible for thousands of deaths in the U.S. each year prior to the discovery of a vaccine in 1963. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but in the last year, there has been a worldwide resurgence of the virus, with cases increasing 30 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). One of the main drivers of this trend is a growing reluctance to vaccinate children, so much so that the WHO listed the anti-vaccination movement as one of its top ten threats to global health in 2019…

❝ According to a 2018 study by the American Journal of Public Health, combating the problem has been made even more difficult by Russian trolls spreading disinformation on the subject. As ThinkProgress has previously documented, Kremlin-backed disinformation agents have specifically focused on wedge issues designed to divide Americans — like Black Lives Matter and immigration issues. Anti-vaccination, it seems, has also fallen into that category.

Ignorance ain’t bliss, folks. It can kill your children and the kids around them. RTFA!

I grew up in the age when the only vaccine available for regular childhood vaccination was for diphtheria. It was common practice every spring among my playmates to gather in the schoolyard first nice day we were allowed outdoors at recess and see who didn’t make it through the winter. We lost one or two kids every winter. Even though measles could and would land in our factory town any time in the year, winter was always the most worrisome. Flu was a big killer. And, yes, we worried as much about polio in the summer. Still, the number one killer in our neighborhood was measles.