"Killing autism" (frightening)

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In all honesty, I find the autism/vaccine thing very exasperating. You probably all know how strongly against vaccinations I am by now and by the number of posts I've done on it, so I won't get into that just now, but it drives me mad. It's been pretty well proven that autism is genetic in nature, although I'll concede there are a few cases of kids with vaccine damage that manifests very similarly to autism. But that isn't autism.

So when they bang on about thimerosal, it distracts from the fact that there are dozens of toxic, poisonous adjuvants in the vaccines with the potential to do untold damage. When they go on about autism, it distracts from the thousands - if not millions - who end up paralysed, genuinely brain-damaged, having seizures, comatose, with Guillain-Barré, ME, etc etc... the dozens of other documented side effects are kinda swept aside because "autism is the only thing you need to worry about, autism is the only thing vaccines can cause". It kinda makes a circus of a very serious subject with very serious concerns, based in very good science rather than primarily anecdotal evidence.

Not to mention all the reasons you mentioned, DW - the creation of autism as a 'boogeyman' creature to be feared and avoided at all costs, and the autistic person some kind of a shell with the 'real' person hiding away inside, waiting for the big bad mercury to go away so they can come out and play 'again'.

Yes.

It feels like it has reached a point where even a rational answer (changing the vaccine schedule, closer monitoring of ingredients, better identification of who is most at risk for negative side effects) won't stop the hysteria.

We can't delay the vaccine schedule while everyone is afraid to get vaccinated at all, because it is those young children, too young to be vaccinated, who remain at the greatest risk when there is an outbreak of a preventable disease. I worry it's all creating a giant catch 22.

Well, whether or not we agree on the overall benefit v. cost of vaccination, we CAN agree that hysteria is highly destructive.

I agree completely - as long as there's hysteria like there is there's not going to be any reasoning with any of them. Reasonable solutions won't happen (as I've said before, I'm not against vaccination fundamentally, I'm against it in its present form), science won't get a word in, and children will get hurt in the process.

As I've said, if you aren't going to vaccinate then you need to bolster the immune system in other ways and keep it supported through nutrition, supplements, and various herbs and/or homoeopathics. But I really can't see any hysterical mother or father crying "Omgz t3h AUTISM monster mite come and eat my baaaaaaby!" listening to reason and undertaking that kind of care for their child in the way they should - sure, they'll probably feed them ok and look after them, but perhaps not specifically keep those immune-boosters up and specifically go out for them. Because all 'vaccination' is bad, right? The autism monster might come and get them? So when the bugs and viruses do come round, as they inevitably will, their child won't be protected at all - by vaccinations or by natural means - and is going to be the one suffering.

Hysteria doesn't get anyone anywhere, and it does just paint a picture of there only being two sides: the big bad stupid dumb cruel parents who vaccinate their children and risk them being spirited away into the big bad world of autism, and the ones who don't do anything and don't vaccinate so their kids will be safe.

Or is that the ones who vaccinate to keep their kids safe, and the ones who are hysterical and crazy and paranoid about some disorder genetic in basis with no relation to vaccines who are putting their kids at risk of disease?


Note that there's no room for the ones who choose not to vaccinate because they don't believe the ingredients - more than just thimerosal - are safe, that there are too many of them, some are unnecessary, they're given too many at once, and that if the cihld is taken care of, kept clean, fed an organic and healthy diet, and has their immune system boosted with supplements, nutrition, herbs, etc etc they'll be ok. The ones who don't vaccinate but will listen to science and read studies and research, rather than just a hysterical story in a 70c women's magazine?



Hysteria doesn't get anyone anywhere. It just polarises people into two sides, and lumps the reasonable 'anti-vaccinators' in with the ones who don't really know what they're on about.

The children will be the ones who suffer for it in the end. Science won't listen to hysteria so the vaccines won't be changed and made safer or the schedules spaced out or whatever other reasonable changes could be made, nor will it listen to the ones who won't vaccinate and are reasonable about it because they'll be lumped in with the hysterics.



Sorry, did that make any sense? I'm tired and when I get tired I'm not so good at articulating what I mean. It makes sense in my head.

Basically, I concur!!

Yes, it made sense. You are frustrated. Understandably. Hysteria and myth are getting in the way of what you believe are reasonable goals and changes, based on extensive research that you've done, and believe in.

The NT world has a bad habit of believing that you need to bang the gong to advance change, period. Whether or not one has all the details right, just bang that gong so everyone will hear it. What this thread points out is all the harm coming from that. And that is frustrating.

And, to give all due to respect to the child in the article that started this thread .... Tragic.

At times ... Evil.

Amen.

I just find the whole thing incredibly sad. It's distorted perceptions so badly that it's got to this point... I mean, it was going to eventually wasn't it, there's not really any other outcome. But that doesn't make it any less of a tragedy.

I guess the only thing that can be said is that we really do need to keep making a concerted effort to get the message out that autism isn't a big bad child-stealing monster before another child is killed in similar circumstances, so this one wasn't in vain.

The merging of the disease and the human being in the mind is a dangerous thing. If its widespread, more than one kid is gonna end up getting asphyxiated. Case in point: the Nazis were infamous for not being able to tell the difference between a person and an aspect of that person. That's why they felt compelled to kill all Jews rather than just religious ones. The final solution began with the T-4 euthanasia program for people with genetic disorders. We were killing epilepsy, they said after the war. What's wrong with that? The few Nazi doctors that were put on trial had a tendency to use collective medical metaphors to say that they had not in fact violated the Hippocratic oath at all, even in their meanest moments. It was usually something along the lines of "the Jews were a diseased appendix we had to remove from the abdomen of Europe." In other words, killing a bunch of individuals who belong to a collective identity is killing the collective identity, not those individuals.

Even in our I-Just-Gotta-Be-Me society, collectivism can rear its ugly head in incidents like this one. This woman could not conceive of her daughter as anything but a member of a collective (in this case autistics), and that collective had to be taken out. The results were typical.

Minor correction: people with disabilities in general, not just people with genetic ones. Aside from their false ideas about what was genetic and what was not, they also called people things like "lives unworthy of life," "useless eaters," "ballast-lives" (yes I took my blog name from the German term for that for a reason), "empty shells," "empty human-shaped husks," etc. A big part of the rationale was the idea that disabled Germans were taking food and money away from "real" Germans, and ought not to be alive. This idea began to really take hold between WWI and WWII, not just with the Nazis either, because Germany's economy was totally trashed and they were looking for scapegoats.

(This is one reason it's really offensive, not to mention dangerous, to begin viewing disabled people as burdens, as not real people but rather empty shells, and as simply taking up resources and giving nothing in return. Not to mention the very idea that the only worth a person has is their economic contribution, which is not true at all. This also means that the autistic community should not be saying "We are, unlike these other people, not empty shells," but rather, "This is a description that no living being should be subjecte to, not us nor anyone else".)

Anbuend is right about everything.

I am pretty pro-vaccine myself. The complications from, say, the diphtheria vaccine are hideous but rare. The complications from diphtheria are hideous and common. But the vaccine-concerned people on this thread are correct when they say that pushing the autism link is hurting the movement for increased vaccine safety. I myself would support the increased vaccine safety movement if they (a) stopped refusing to vaccinate their children (seriously, an unvaccinated child in Britain just died of diphtheria despite good sanitation and herd immunity. We immunize for a reason, y'all. Hurray for the conquest of polio!) and (b) shut up about autism.

Hopefully there are qualifiers on that 'everything'???

No. You are in fact God the all-knowing. Congratulations.

crazy religious fanatics. dickholes!

The problem with the vaccination panic is that the parents of small children today don't realize what a threat those diseases once were, and will be again if enough kids aren't vaccinated. They need to talk to some older people, who remember frantically bundling their kids off to the country in the summer, hoping to avoid the polio epidemic. Or people who grew up with an older sibling who had been crippled by the disease.
And every time I see that ad on TV that seems to equate having an autistic child with losing a child to a fatal car accident, I'm shocked all over again that it is still allowed to air. I mean, it not only insults people with autism and their families, but parents who have actually lost children! Hey, if you don't want your autistic kid, there are plenty of people with an empty space in their homes and in their hearts.

[quote=] Case in point: the Nazis were infamous for not being able to tell the difference between a person and an aspect of that person. That's why they felt compelled to kill all Jews rather than just religious ones.[/quote]

- what -? I KNOW you didn't mean that the way it sounds!

You mean like the extremists among the christians and athiests going at it in the PPR forum?

- what -? I KNOW you didn't mean that the way it sounds![/quote]

Wait----how does that sound?

Oh damn, not again.

Hardly. I'm strongly and firmly anti-vaccine (as they are at present, anyway) and I have an uncle who was left barely able to walk thanks to polio. My grandparents remember how things were once upon a time and they won't let a vaccine near them either - they remember how these diseases were coming to a halt before the introduction of vaccines, and have seen the damage they can do. Both work in the medical profession, as I'm training to myself. I also remember a rubella epidemic at my school as a child; virtually everyone got it, virtually everyone was vaccinated, and it didn't come from a non-vaccinated child to begin with.


Completely agree with the advert (not sure what one you're talking about as we're obviously in different countries, but I know the sort...! !) though.