The virulent anti-vaccination movement is limited in the UK, though the MMR panic, based on what the BMJ is happy to call fraudulent research and encouraged by papers like the Daily Mail, has done plenty of damage. Inexpert, celebrity-led campaigns have taken a much stronger hold in the USA and the fightback is increasingly urgent. Jennifer Raff's post, Dear parents you are being lied to, with multiple authoritative links, is as good a counter attack as any. This ignorant conspiracy theory kills. If vaccination drops below critical levels, people will die. In the same way, Thabo Mbeki's HIV denial may have cost 300,000 lives.
This should be enough to convince people to counter this nonsense where they can, hoping that people are open to persuasion. But this underestimates the sheer nastiness of convinced obsessives, another example of which I saw today. This Australian report details the harassment of parents who had lost a child to a communicable disease. Yes, the parents of dead children are their target. So perhaps the Aldrin method is the best way of dealing with them after all.
This should be enough to convince people to counter this nonsense where they can, hoping that people are open to persuasion. But this underestimates the sheer nastiness of convinced obsessives, another example of which I saw today. This Australian report details the harassment of parents who had lost a child to a communicable disease. Yes, the parents of dead children are their target. So perhaps the Aldrin method is the best way of dealing with them after all.
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