“I thought I had seen every antivaccine argument out there.”
“Orac” writes at Respectful Insolence:
In the more than a decade since I first discovered, to my shock, that there are actual people out there who not only don’t believe that vaccines are safe despite overwhelming evidence that they are but in fact believe that they don’t work and are dangerous, I thought I had seen every antivaccine argument out there. After all, I just wrote about the tactics and the tropes of the antivaccine movement in which I reviewed, well, the tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement. One of the favorite (and therefore most commonly used) tropes of the anti-vaccine movement is that vaccines are somehow “unnatural.” There are many variants of this particular trope, for example the claim that “natural” infection is better than vaccination. This delusion sometimes reaches the point where some antivaccine parents will do something as stupid as to try to send lollipops licked by their children with chickenpox through the mail to other parents, the aim being to allow those parents to expose their children the chickenpox in order to give their children the “benefit” of “natural immunity.”
Yes, I thought I had seen every variation of the “unnatural” trope so beloved by antivaccinationists that, I must admit, the following took me rather by surprise. It’s on a website whose name GreenMedInfo.com tells you just about all you need to know about it. My brief perusal of the site reveals that it’s chock full of “natural” medicine quackery. Consistent with this, it appears to be rabidly antivaccine, as evidenced by a little dittie by someone named Sayer, who appears to be the person responsible for this website, entitled The Vaccination Agenda: An Implicit Transhumanism/Dehumanism. it’s a crank trifecta, combining antivaccine tropes, conspiracy mongering, and the natural fallacy in heaping helpings, all topped off with fear mongering implying that vaccines are somehow responsible for making us less “human.” At this late date, having been in the trenches for a while, even I don’t recall having seen a screed so full of crazy. It’s perfect for a Friday, when, even though I rarely do “Your Friday Dose of Woo” anymore, this might have been a good candidate for it. You’ll see what I mean right away:…
Read “Vaccines are ‘transhumanism’ that subverts evolution?”
People who get their medical advice from someone (Sayer Ji) with only a BA in philosophy from Rutgers U (1991 to 1996, according to his website) get what they deserve. Let’s hope their children do not travel to the third world and die from exposure to diseases controlled in developed countries where the majority of parents choose to vaccinate. I expect that Sayer Ji was vaccinated as a child; I can’t imagine anyone with ties to the Indian subcontinent not choosing vaccination if it was available.