Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
The number of kids whose caregivers are opting them out of routine childhood vaccines has reached an all-time high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of children unprotected against preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The report did not dive into the reasons for the increase, but experts said the findings clearly reflect Americans’ growing unease about medicine in general.
“There is a rising distrust in the health care system,” said Dr. Amna Husain, a pediatrician in private practice in North Carolina, as well as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Vaccine exemptions “have unfortunately trended upward with it.”
Care to explain? Basically every trustworthy source I skimmed through supports their argument.
Also, if you ever want proof that someone is a brainwashed, right-wing shill, just look for the phrase “THE covid vaccine”. Because in their mind, there is only one. Not over a dozen different ones that actually exist. Hell, in the USA alone there’s at least 4 different original-strain covid vaccines, not including the new bivalent vaccines.
But no. “THE covid vaccine”. 🤦
For a simple start, he doesn’t understand the difference between a virus / bacterium/etc and what a disease is.
Nor does he understand what a vaccine is, or what it does.
Nor does he understand that every pathogen has a different rate / volume of transmission, acts differently on different people in different conditions and so on.
This is all right-wing, anti-science propaganda that we saw far too much of in 2020. This false idea that “if it isn’t a magic 100% force field then it doesn’t work at all”.
It’s all BS to get stupid people to do nothing and become petri dishes for bugs. Nothing owns the libs like trying their hardest to do nothing and die off. Or something like that.
I don’t see how he says that because he specifically mentions how every vaccine is different, which is true. The first mRNA vaccines are way more effective than prior flu vaccines, for example. That intuitively seems important for defining the ratio needed to achieve herd immunity.
The only statement that I could consider false is that not meeting the “herd immunity ratio” is “useless.” This obviously isn’t true on a personal level, but on a community level in the context of herd immunity, it seems to be true based on my limited knowledge. Every source I’ve looked at says that the US as a whole has not reached herd immunity, especially since the newer COVID variants are spread more easily and thus require a higher proportion of people vaccinated.
I don’t think this person is spreading misinformation or right-wing talking points. It seems that they have knowledge but can’t effectively express it in a way that isn’t misleading to a lay person. This (personally) seems like a widespread issue within STEM and not some comment made out of malice. There seems to be a huge disconnect between medical or scientific goals as well as public messaging that supports said goals
EDIT: I wanted to mention his comment about vaccines still allowing the spread of disease. He isn’t saying that the vaccines aren’t effective, but it does mean that you can carry a pathogen to someone else who isn’t vaccinated. Vaccines aren’t a silver bullet, even if they’re really good.