Doctor: Do you want to vaccinate your kid ?
Anti-vaxxer: No Vaccines cause Autism !
Doctor: Umm I were did you find that out ?
Anti-vaxxer: I did 2 hours of research on Google and Wikipedia
Doctor: um I've had 14 years of medical research
and I think you should vaccinate your child for their safety.
Anti-vaxxer: My child is fine all he needs is a little essential oils and he'll be fine.
(looks at dying child)
Child: Momma... I'm dying because of measles
Doctor(quietly): Should have vaccinated.
The position of a person who believes that vaccines are generally armful for health and are associated (yet not limited) to the cause of autism in children.
Ignoring the whole body of well documented evidence that vaccines have effectively cured diseases like polio, smallpox and measles, anti-vaxers most common arguments are based on false correlation statistics, mainly seeded by dubious and discredited studies. They will argue that if celebrities like Jenny McCarth, Michele Bachmann and Charlie Sheen agrees with them, then who cares about a scientists opinion?
Anti-vaxers will generally accuse the opposition of partaking in a global "big pharma" conspiracy, if ever they dare to disagree with them.
Such movement poses a real threat for the children. They are particularly vulnerable because of the time they pass in schools classrooms, playing field or any other social gatherings, which can greatly increase the spread of infectious diseases even if a majority of children are vaccinated.
Anti-vaxer arguments in a nutshell:
"I just don't see the evidence for vaccines causing aut..."
- "YOU'RE JUST A SHILL PAID BY BIG PHARMA!!!"
An individual that has not taken the time to educate themselves on the Supreme Court case Bruesewitz v. Wyeth Inc.. According to the Supreme Court opinion in Smith ex rel. Smith v. Wyeth Labs., Inc., โunavoidably unsafeโ things are products that โwhen given proper manufacture and labeling, no feasible alternative design would reduce the safety risks without compromising the productโs cost and utility.โ Under this definition, cars, medications, household cleaners, forks and many more daily use items would be deemed โunavoidably unsafe.โ It is given this qualification due to the individuals reaction, not the vaccine itself. Anti-Vax individuals have also ignored or simply refused to believe the statistics given by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which state that of the 3,153,876,236 vaccines given from 01/01/2006 through 12/31/2016, only 3,597 cases presented due to vaccine injury were compensated, with 2,660 of those cases just being settlements, which means the injury was not necessarily caused by the vaccines, so about .000001141% of vaccinations cause injury. If that statistic was interpolated to the USA, with roughly a population of 324,000,000 people, and everyone were to receive vaccines, only ~370 people would be injured.
Anti-vax individuals also put immunosuppressed individuals at risk such as newborns, elderly, cancer patients or AIDS patients. So choosing not to vaccinate affects more than just their kids.
"My 3 year old new born just suffocated to death from diphtheria because of my anti-vax nanny."
"My friend is anti-vax and always comes up with such specific evidence I never know what to say, but when I go home and look it up, it turns out he's just cherry picking words and flimsy evidence."