Hundreds quarantined for measles in 2 CA universities.

[Duhon]

There is an interesting comparison there.

People cannot be forcibly treated (and I would be concerned about compelled treatment of competent adults, due to the issues that presents with body autonomy), however they can be prosecuted in some places if they intentionally transmit an STI.

I stress I am not actually in favour of criminal prosecution and removal of children from non-vaccinating parents (though I am in favour of supervision orders to compel parents to vaccinate, if there's no medical reason -- for serious diseases like measles and polio), and I would prefer for such an approach to be augmented by greater public education to tackle misinformation so that, over time, such measures hardly needs to be used.

But the presence of laws that allow people to be prosecuted for deliberately transmitting an STI does suggest that it would not be out of order for anti-vaccination parents to be encouraged to consider the wider good (of children too young to be vaccinated, the pregnant, the immunocompromised, the elderly).

But those laws only effect those who knowingly transmit the disease. Anti-Vaxxer folks aren't doing that AFAIK.

For a certain value of "unknowingly transmitting" -- that is, they made themselves ignorant, yet demand freedom of movement for themselves, whether they be vectors or not.

[The Free Joy State]

If they knowingly don't have their child vaccinated -- despite their child being medically fit for vaccination -- and their child gets ill with the disease they didn't vaccinate for, and they then take their ill child outside (to the park, to school, to one of the disease parties that anti-vaxxers still hold), that would be knowing transmission to unknowing parties.

But that wasn't the comparison I was making. It was more about the individual -- the person with an STI, the parent who doesn't wish to be vaccinated -- may have medical autonomy (different rules should apply with children, who precedent shows have a right to be protected from their parents' decisions), but there is also legal precedent for them having a duty to protect other people from things that may cause them medical harm.

Only if they knew they had a serious infectious disease.

There's a legal precedent that you must protect people from acts that *will* cause medical harm, for certain.

Measles, mumps, polio, etc. are known to be serious diseases with potentially deadly effects.

Children can be protected from Jehovah's Witness parents who don't wish to let them have a blood transfusion. It makes sense to protect children from parents who won't let them be vaccinated against diseases that can cause encephalitis and death.

An STI isn't certain to kill; but it is certain to be unpleasant, highly infectious and (with some exceptions) largely avoidable with correct care. Measles isn't certain to kill; but it will be unpleasant, highly infectious and (with some exceptions) largely avoidable with correct care. They seem comparable enough to me.

[Duhon]

Clearly fines don't work on people who've set themselves on infecting as many as possible.

Come now, you're lying. That is not their goal and you know it. It's really pathetic how it's not enough for some of the people in this thread to be right about vaccinations, they have to be downright hateful and shitty. Newsflash: opposing anti-vaxxers doesn't mean you have to lie about them or talk about putting them in Gulag or any of the other bullshit that comes up in these threads.

If they are ready to pay fines to resume the semblance of normal lives despite their potential as vectors, then fines aren't enough of a deterrent. Quarantining them (or "putting them in Gulag" as you put) won't work either, after you reach a certain number of people, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

[Duhon]

... what insane logic is this? "Vaccines don't prevent infection in every case, therefore ditch vaccines and YOLO like before"?

Bear in mind that, in the case of measles, "before" meant a disease so common someone once quipped that catching it was as inevitable as death and taxes. You're saying a few deaths for the sake of bodily autonomy... is acceptable.

Nice strawman.

You're the one denying the effectiveness of vaccines, Chern, or am I wrong in reading your very words?

[The Greater Ohio Valley]

I sense that you’d very likely change your tune really quick if there was another Spanish flu-level pandemic that killed hundreds of millions of people and the governments of the world mandated vaccination programs to stop it.

Nope.

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others and allow the further spread of the pandemic instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent you and billions of others from dying and stop the spread of the pandemic?

[Highever]

Nope.

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent from dying?

Even hundreds of millions is probably a lowball number if something of the scale of the 1918 pandemic were to occur in the modern day.

[The Greater Ohio Valley]

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent from dying?

Even hundreds of millions is probably a lowball number if something of the scale of the 1918 pandemic were to occur in the modern day.

I’m just throwing an estimate out there based on the 3-5% killed during 1918-19. I’m a bit dubious that an IRL disease could steamroll humanity more than that unless it’s some sort Plague Inc. level specifically evolved super disease.

[Highever]

Even hundreds of millions is probably a lowball number if something of the scale of the 1918 pandemic were to occur in the modern day.

I’m just throwing an estimate out there based on the 3-5% killed during 1918-19. I’m a bit dubious that an IRL disease could steamroll humanity more than that unless it’s some sort Plague Inc. level specifically evolved super disease.

It has more to do with how interconnected the world is now and the ease of travel there is. It would spread far quicker than it did then and far more would be infected in a shorter span of time, especially in urban areas of South Korea, China, or India.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

Nope.

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others and allow the further spread of the pandemic instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent you and billions of others from dying and stop the spread of the pandemic?

With me, it's a lack of concern for whether I live or die, and my belief that a massive global-level tragedy is necessary for the continued survival of the human race.

[Duhon]

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others and allow the further spread of the pandemic instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent you and billions of others from dying and stop the spread of the pandemic?

With me, it's a lack of concern for whether I live or die, and my belief that a massive global-level tragedy is necessary for the continued survival of the human race.

You may have a death wish, but billions don't. Don't pass it on to us.

[Thermodolia]

Actually it does. As it puts you at higher risk of catching a deadly disease


No it’s not a fallacy. You are pretty much an anti-vaxxer. You use the same language, terminology, and you refuse to believe that being unvaccinated is harmful.

You’re just mad I called you out on your bullshit


The FBI and CIA thanks you. Don’t worry I’m sure ADX Florence has something to entertain you


What? You think that only you can make outlandish claims? Have you seen what I’ve advocated?

1. No it doesn't, being infected and coming into contact with others does.

Which vaccines help prevent. How hard is this?

2. It is very much a fallacy. Or does this mean I can accuse all leftists of being Communists just because they make the same talking points for healthcare and other things?

Communists are leftists though. A leftist is one on the far left. And no it’s not the same because you are literally questioning vaccines.

''Ur just mad bro!'' Geez could you get anymore desperate?

Well you are.

3. Lol is the big bad socialist guy gonna report me to the popos now? Gee, I'm sooo scared! Yeah, pick a number and get in line.

What, you think that socialists don’t like authority like the police?

4. What outlandish claims have I made? I'm not the one thinking they can point guns at people's heads and force them to get vaccinated.

That vaccines don’t work for one, that unvaccinated people don’t cause harm, and that there’s nothing wrong with being anti-vaxx.

I’m not saying that I’d point a gun at people’s head. You said that. I said that those who refuse mandatory vaccination orders will be sent to jail.

My comment is in response to your call for an uprising against the government due to mandatory vaccinations

[Thermodolia]

I don’t give a fuck about what they feel

Cool, just don't bitch and call them terrorists when you meet armed resistance.

See this is what I mean by outlandish claims. And if you want a war I’ll give you one. The full might of the state vs a terrorist group. I wonder who will win.

Ah “libertarians” always destroying the thing they love the most because of their own stupidity.

[The Greater Ohio Valley]

With me, it's a lack of concern for whether I live or die, and my belief that a massive global-level tragedy is necessary for the continued survival of the human race.

You may have a death wish, but billions don't. Don't pass it on to us.

^

[Hurtful Thoughts]

With me, it's a lack of concern for whether I live or die, and my belief that a massive global-level tragedy is necessary for the continued survival of the human race.

You may have a death wish, but billions don't. Don't pass it on to us.

When did the anti-vax movement become the Thanos initiative?

[The Black Forrest]

Why would you rather die along with hundreds of millions of others and allow the further spread of the pandemic instead of getting the vaccine that would prevent you and billions of others from dying and stop the spread of the pandemic?

With me, it's a lack of concern for whether I live or die, and my belief that a massive global-level tragedy is necessary for the continued survival of the human race.

Ok Thanos.

[Gormwood]

Anti-vaxxers target communities battling measles

MONSEY, N.Y. — In a suburban shopping center an hour north of New York City, hundreds of mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered in a sex-partitioned ballroom to hear leaders of the national anti-vaccine movement.

Sustained applause greeted Del Bigtree, a former television-producer-turned-activist who often wears a yellow star , similar to those required of Jews in Nazi Germany, to show solidarity with parents ordered to keep unvaccinated children at home.

Bigtree described the purported dangers of childhood vaccines in phrases that also conjured the Nazis.

“They have turned our children into the largest human experiment in history — all of history,” he said.

The turnout last week in this suburb hard hit by measles helps explain why New York has become ground zero in one of this country’s largest and longest-lasting measles outbreaks in nearly 30 years. Even in a religious community grappling with more than 700 cases in Rockland County and New York City since last fall — among them, children on oxygen in intensive-care units — anxious and confused parents said they came because they are afraid of vaccines and seeking guidance about what to do.

Ethan, a 36-year-old father of six from Queens who declined to give his last name, said he attended the event out of “a genuine concern” for his family, driven by his wife’s research into vaccines. She had read “a lot of literature” and watched Bigtree’s film, which accuses the government of covering up a purported link between the measles vaccine and autism — a tie repeatedly disproved by studies around the world involving hundreds of thousands of children.

As a result, Ethan said, measles frightened him far less than what Bigtree and others described as the toxic substances in vaccines.

“I love doctors,” Ethan said, but they have “blind obedience” to the vaccine schedule. “God gave us a wonderful, beautiful body that heals itself.”

State and national health officials say groups such as Bigtree’s are directly responsible for the measles outbreaks that struck Orthodox communities here and in New York City this year. Through an aggressive social media campaign, pamphleteering and traveling road shows that pop up in receptive and often insular communities, officials say, the anti-vaccine movement has produced pockets of unvaccinated children where the highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease can catch fire.

The groups’ claims are flatly contradicted by science, but their rhetoric has sent vaccination rates plummeting across the country, including among Eastern European immigrants outside Portland, Ore., the Somali community in Minnesota and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, and here in Rockland County — all groups that have experienced recent outbreaks.

“This is a national movement of people who are nothing but charlatans, conspiracy theorists and people . . . spreading misinformation,” said Rockland County Executive Ed Day. “The type of propaganda they spread is a danger to the health and safety of children within our community and around the world.”

In many ways, vaccines are a victim of their own success. Years ago, people were intimately familiar with the suffering caused by diseases such as polio, whooping cough and measles. Today, they’ve been virtually eliminated — along with the memory of their terrible effects.

As a result, generations of parents have grown up “more likely to be scared of the vaccine than the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It’s very easy to appeal to those fears.”

The modern anti-vaccine movement began about 40 years ago in response to legitimate concerns about the side effects of a pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. But it has metastasized into something far darker in the echo chamber of Facebook chat rooms, WhatsApp and YouTube — especially against a backdrop of rising suspicion of elites, including drugmakers, doctors and public health officials.

Anti-vaccine activists have a rhetorical advantage: They speak with absolute certainty about frightening cases of so-called vaccine injuries based on changes parents say they observe in their children after getting shots.

Scientists and researchers, by contrast, rarely speak in absolutes. They say vaccines save countless lives, but like all medicines, have side effects — albeit rare ones. And they sometimes challenge what parents think they have seen with their own eyes by explaining that health problems such as autism often become apparent around the same time children are receiving multiple shots — even though there is no causal connection.

A reaction spurs a movement

The modern anti-vaccine movement began in 1980 with a heartbreak that propelled a Virginia mother into activism.

Several hours after her eldest son — then 2½ — got his fourth shot to prevent diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus, Barbara Loe Fisher said she found him staring straight ahead as if he couldn’t see her. “When I called out his name, his eyelids fluttered, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his head fell to his shoulder,” she recalled.

Fisher has written on her website that her son suffered a convulsion, collapse and brain inflammation and grew up with multiple learning disabilities. After seeing a television special on possible dangers of the DPT vaccine, Fisher suspected a link to the vaccine.

At the time, the pertussis component of the vaccine was made with many more proteins than other childhood vaccines, and had a significant risk of side effects, including fever and in some cases, seizures. (The problem was corrected in newer versions of the vaccine.)

Fisher became a national advocate, warning parents about possible risks and working with Congress to craft legislation creating a vaccine compensation program and an improved vaccine monitoring system — one of several safety systems still in use.

Today, the National Vaccine Information Center in Sterling, Va., which she founded, is considered one of the most effective lobbyists for parental choice, combating efforts in New York and other states to make it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children.

“We don’t tell people what to do,” Fisher said in a recent interview. “We support informed voluntary medical decisions that people make. We do not tell people to vaccinate or not to vaccinate.”

A discredited study's impact

In 1998, the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, published a paper that would cause the anti-vaccine movement to explode. The paper, by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and other authors, claimed to have found a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism in eight children.

The paper was later found to be fraudulent. Wakefield’s fellow authors issued a retraction. So did the Lancet after an investigation by British medical authorities. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license after a panel concluded that he had financial and ethical conflicts of interest and had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.”

But the damage was done. MMR vaccination rates plunged in Britain, Ireland, the United States and other countries at a time of rising concern about autism diagnoses.

To many parents, Wakefield’s thesis seemed believable because symptoms of autism first appear when children are about 12 months old — the same age they receive their first MMR vaccine, said Alison Singer, a New York City mother with a severely autistic daughter.

“Up until Wakefield, no one had really put the two together,” said Singer, who now heads the Autism Science Foundation, which supports research into the condition’s causes.

Twenty-one studies since that Lancet study have found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. The latest and largest, from Denmark, involved 657,461 Danish children born between 1999 and 2010.

In the intervening years, researchers have implicated genetic and environmental factors in autism, such as older fathers and infections during pregnancy. Scientists now believe that more than 100 genes affect an individual’s risk for autism, said Josh Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

“About 15 to 20 percent of people with diagnoses of autism can now be told by their doctors why they have it,” Gordon said.

Despite all the subsequent research, Wakefield’s discredited ideas have become firmly entrenched in anti-vaccine mythology.

“Once you put a scary thought in someone’s head, it’s very hard to get it out,” Singer said.

The notion that vaccines are implicated in autism and a host of other medical conditions is now championed by an increasingly organized anti-vaccine movement that includes at least a dozen national organizations and hundreds of Facebook groups, many of them private. Many cast themselves as promoting individual and parental rights and fighting government overreach — a cause that resonates with individuals across the political spectrum.

High-profile leaders such as Bigtree, founder of Informed Consent Action Network in Austin, and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, crisscross the country railing against vaccine dangers and advocating for parental choice.

Bigtree, the son of a minister, is a charismatic speaker who draws large crowds at wellness conferences and state legislative hearings. A former daytime television producer for “The Doctors,” he said he became a vaccine safety advocate after hearing from so many aggrieved parents after partnering with Wakefield on a movie about Wakefield’s theories.

“The moment we began expanding the vaccination program, our health has been declining in our children,” Bigtree said recently on a weekly live show he distributes on Facebook and YouTube. For his HighWire show, he has about 140,000 Facebook followers and 44,000 YouTube subscribers.

Kennedy’s interest in vaccines grew out of his advocacy work on environmental pollutants. He accuses drugmakers of colluding with the health establishment to cover up vaccines’ alleged role in rising rates of a gamut of chronic diseases and even teen suicide — claims rejected by the American Academy of Pediatrics and virtually every leading health and science organization in the world.

In January 2017, Kennedy stunned the medical establishment by announcing that then-President-elect Trump had asked him to lead a commission looking at vaccines and autism — a subject Trump had mentioned repeatedly on the campaign trail.

But the White House never went forward with the commission. And last month, when U.S. measles cases reached a record high, Trump urged parents to “get the shots” for their children.

In an extraordinary public rebuke this month, three members of Kennedy’s family — including his brother, a former congressman, and his sister, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland — accused Kennedy of being “part of a misinformation ­campaign that’s having heartbreaking — and deadly — consequences.”

“We love Bobby. . . . We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment,” they wrote. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”

'One-way propaganda'

Most Americans continue to support immunizations, as evidenced by high national vaccination rates, but there are worrisome trends: The percentage of children younger than 2 who haven’t received any vaccinations, for instance, has quadrupled since 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And in more than a dozen hot spots across the country, including the Seattle and Portland areas, which have had measles outbreaks, immunization rates have plunged as an increasing number of parents receive nonmedical exemptions to avoid having to give their children the shots, according to a study last year.

The link between places with low vaccination rates and measles outbreaks is clear: In some of Williamsburg’s yeshivas, for instance, up to 22 percent of children did not receive the MMR vaccine for religious reasons during the 2017-2018 school year, according to New York state data.

Anti-vaccine activists encourage that trend by arguing that the vaccine is potentially more dangerous than the disease.

At the Monsey forum, Rabbi Hillel Handler called resistance to measles shots a brave act. The virus, which once killed several hundred Americans every year, “is not a serious disease,” he said, asserting that those who battle it in childhood grow up stronger.

Public health officials are trying to fight back. They note that children who have recovered from measles are more susceptible to infections and are at risk for serious complications.

In the Brooklyn neighborhoods at the heart of the New York City outbreak, nurse practitioner Blima Marcus holds regular meetings with small groups of ultra-Orthodox women in their homes, spending hours answering their questions. As a member of the same Orthodox community, Marcus says it is easier for her to gain their trust.

Often, she said, the women are surprised by the scientific studies she brings that disprove links between the measles vaccine and autism. Afterward, some tell her they feel they’ve been “really misled.”

“These are insular women who are trying to do the best for their children,” Marcus said. “At the end of the day, I feel the majority of people who don’t vaccinate are the victims of a one-way propaganda machine.”

Anti-vaxxers gathering at the site of a measles outbreak. It's like scavengers flying over the dying.

[Duhon]

Arrest them. They might actually bring with them disease vectors, inanimate and otherwise. These malevolently stupid fuckwits.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

Anti-vaxxers target communities battling measles

MONSEY, N.Y. — In a suburban shopping center an hour north of New York City, hundreds of mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered in a sex-partitioned ballroom to hear leaders of the national anti-vaccine movement.

Sustained applause greeted Del Bigtree, a former television-producer-turned-activist who often wears a yellow star , similar to those required of Jews in Nazi Germany, to show solidarity with parents ordered to keep unvaccinated children at home.

Bigtree described the purported dangers of childhood vaccines in phrases that also conjured the Nazis.

“They have turned our children into the largest human experiment in history — all of history,” he said.

The turnout last week in this suburb hard hit by measles helps explain why New York has become ground zero in one of this country’s largest and longest-lasting measles outbreaks in nearly 30 years. Even in a religious community grappling with more than 700 cases in Rockland County and New York City since last fall — among them, children on oxygen in intensive-care units — anxious and confused parents said they came because they are afraid of vaccines and seeking guidance about what to do.

Ethan, a 36-year-old father of six from Queens who declined to give his last name, said he attended the event out of “a genuine concern” for his family, driven by his wife’s research into vaccines. She had read “a lot of literature” and watched Bigtree’s film, which accuses the government of covering up a purported link between the measles vaccine and autism — a tie repeatedly disproved by studies around the world involving hundreds of thousands of children.

As a result, Ethan said, measles frightened him far less than what Bigtree and others described as the toxic substances in vaccines.

“I love doctors,” Ethan said, but they have “blind obedience” to the vaccine schedule. “God gave us a wonderful, beautiful body that heals itself.”

State and national health officials say groups such as Bigtree’s are directly responsible for the measles outbreaks that struck Orthodox communities here and in New York City this year. Through an aggressive social media campaign, pamphleteering and traveling road shows that pop up in receptive and often insular communities, officials say, the anti-vaccine movement has produced pockets of unvaccinated children where the highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease can catch fire.

The groups’ claims are flatly contradicted by science, but their rhetoric has sent vaccination rates plummeting across the country, including among Eastern European immigrants outside Portland, Ore., the Somali community in Minnesota and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, and here in Rockland County — all groups that have experienced recent outbreaks.

“This is a national movement of people who are nothing but charlatans, conspiracy theorists and people . . . spreading misinformation,” said Rockland County Executive Ed Day. “The type of propaganda they spread is a danger to the health and safety of children within our community and around the world.”

In many ways, vaccines are a victim of their own success. Years ago, people were intimately familiar with the suffering caused by diseases such as polio, whooping cough and measles. Today, they’ve been virtually eliminated — along with the memory of their terrible effects.

As a result, generations of parents have grown up “more likely to be scared of the vaccine than the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It’s very easy to appeal to those fears.”

The modern anti-vaccine movement began about 40 years ago in response to legitimate concerns about the side effects of a pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. But it has metastasized into something far darker in the echo chamber of Facebook chat rooms, WhatsApp and YouTube — especially against a backdrop of rising suspicion of elites, including drugmakers, doctors and public health officials.

Anti-vaccine activists have a rhetorical advantage: They speak with absolute certainty about frightening cases of so-called vaccine injuries based on changes parents say they observe in their children after getting shots.

Scientists and researchers, by contrast, rarely speak in absolutes. They say vaccines save countless lives, but like all medicines, have side effects — albeit rare ones. And they sometimes challenge what parents think they have seen with their own eyes by explaining that health problems such as autism often become apparent around the same time children are receiving multiple shots — even though there is no causal connection.

A reaction spurs a movement

The modern anti-vaccine movement began in 1980 with a heartbreak that propelled a Virginia mother into activism.

Several hours after her eldest son — then 2½ — got his fourth shot to prevent diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus, Barbara Loe Fisher said she found him staring straight ahead as if he couldn’t see her. “When I called out his name, his eyelids fluttered, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his head fell to his shoulder,” she recalled.

Fisher has written on her website that her son suffered a convulsion, collapse and brain inflammation and grew up with multiple learning disabilities. After seeing a television special on possible dangers of the DPT vaccine, Fisher suspected a link to the vaccine.

At the time, the pertussis component of the vaccine was made with many more proteins than other childhood vaccines, and had a significant risk of side effects, including fever and in some cases, seizures. (The problem was corrected in newer versions of the vaccine.)

Fisher became a national advocate, warning parents about possible risks and working with Congress to craft legislation creating a vaccine compensation program and an improved vaccine monitoring system — one of several safety systems still in use.

Today, the National Vaccine Information Center in Sterling, Va., which she founded, is considered one of the most effective lobbyists for parental choice, combating efforts in New York and other states to make it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children.

“We don’t tell people what to do,” Fisher said in a recent interview. “We support informed voluntary medical decisions that people make. We do not tell people to vaccinate or not to vaccinate.”

A discredited study's impact

In 1998, the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, published a paper that would cause the anti-vaccine movement to explode. The paper, by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and other authors, claimed to have found a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism in eight children.

The paper was later found to be fraudulent. Wakefield’s fellow authors issued a retraction. So did the Lancet after an investigation by British medical authorities. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license after a panel concluded that he had financial and ethical conflicts of interest and had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.”

But the damage was done. MMR vaccination rates plunged in Britain, Ireland, the United States and other countries at a time of rising concern about autism diagnoses.

To many parents, Wakefield’s thesis seemed believable because symptoms of autism first appear when children are about 12 months old — the same age they receive their first MMR vaccine, said Alison Singer, a New York City mother with a severely autistic daughter.

“Up until Wakefield, no one had really put the two together,” said Singer, who now heads the Autism Science Foundation, which supports research into the condition’s causes.

Twenty-one studies since that Lancet study have found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. The latest and largest, from Denmark, involved 657,461 Danish children born between 1999 and 2010.

In the intervening years, researchers have implicated genetic and environmental factors in autism, such as older fathers and infections during pregnancy. Scientists now believe that more than 100 genes affect an individual’s risk for autism, said Josh Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

“About 15 to 20 percent of people with diagnoses of autism can now be told by their doctors why they have it,” Gordon said.

Despite all the subsequent research, Wakefield’s discredited ideas have become firmly entrenched in anti-vaccine mythology.

“Once you put a scary thought in someone’s head, it’s very hard to get it out,” Singer said.

The notion that vaccines are implicated in autism and a host of other medical conditions is now championed by an increasingly organized anti-vaccine movement that includes at least a dozen national organizations and hundreds of Facebook groups, many of them private. Many cast themselves as promoting individual and parental rights and fighting government overreach — a cause that resonates with individuals across the political spectrum.

High-profile leaders such as Bigtree, founder of Informed Consent Action Network in Austin, and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, crisscross the country railing against vaccine dangers and advocating for parental choice.

Bigtree, the son of a minister, is a charismatic speaker who draws large crowds at wellness conferences and state legislative hearings. A former daytime television producer for “The Doctors,” he said he became a vaccine safety advocate after hearing from so many aggrieved parents after partnering with Wakefield on a movie about Wakefield’s theories.

“The moment we began expanding the vaccination program, our health has been declining in our children,” Bigtree said recently on a weekly live show he distributes on Facebook and YouTube. For his HighWire show, he has about 140,000 Facebook followers and 44,000 YouTube subscribers.

Kennedy’s interest in vaccines grew out of his advocacy work on environmental pollutants. He accuses drugmakers of colluding with the health establishment to cover up vaccines’ alleged role in rising rates of a gamut of chronic diseases and even teen suicide — claims rejected by the American Academy of Pediatrics and virtually every leading health and science organization in the world.

In January 2017, Kennedy stunned the medical establishment by announcing that then-President-elect Trump had asked him to lead a commission looking at vaccines and autism — a subject Trump had mentioned repeatedly on the campaign trail.

But the White House never went forward with the commission. And last month, when U.S. measles cases reached a record high, Trump urged parents to “get the shots” for their children.

In an extraordinary public rebuke this month, three members of Kennedy’s family — including his brother, a former congressman, and his sister, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland — accused Kennedy of being “part of a misinformation ­campaign that’s having heartbreaking — and deadly — consequences.”

“We love Bobby. . . . We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment,” they wrote. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”

'One-way propaganda'

Most Americans continue to support immunizations, as evidenced by high national vaccination rates, but there are worrisome trends: The percentage of children younger than 2 who haven’t received any vaccinations, for instance, has quadrupled since 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And in more than a dozen hot spots across the country, including the Seattle and Portland areas, which have had measles outbreaks, immunization rates have plunged as an increasing number of parents receive nonmedical exemptions to avoid having to give their children the shots, according to a study last year.

The link between places with low vaccination rates and measles outbreaks is clear: In some of Williamsburg’s yeshivas, for instance, up to 22 percent of children did not receive the MMR vaccine for religious reasons during the 2017-2018 school year, according to New York state data.

Anti-vaccine activists encourage that trend by arguing that the vaccine is potentially more dangerous than the disease.

At the Monsey forum, Rabbi Hillel Handler called resistance to measles shots a brave act. The virus, which once killed several hundred Americans every year, “is not a serious disease,” he said, asserting that those who battle it in childhood grow up stronger.

Public health officials are trying to fight back. They note that children who have recovered from measles are more susceptible to infections and are at risk for serious complications.

In the Brooklyn neighborhoods at the heart of the New York City outbreak, nurse practitioner Blima Marcus holds regular meetings with small groups of ultra-Orthodox women in their homes, spending hours answering their questions. As a member of the same Orthodox community, Marcus says it is easier for her to gain their trust.

Often, she said, the women are surprised by the scientific studies she brings that disprove links between the measles vaccine and autism. Afterward, some tell her they feel they’ve been “really misled.”

“These are insular women who are trying to do the best for their children,” Marcus said. “At the end of the day, I feel the majority of people who don’t vaccinate are the victims of a one-way propaganda machine.”

Anti-vaxxers gathering at the site of a measles outbreak. It's like scavengers flying over the dying.

Ahem:

... wth?

Therm... no...

Anti-vaccination support groups and social events... they're a thing... and it totally undermines herd-immunity by creating a herd with 0% vaccinations and then spreading it around to other communities like some form of sapient weaponized biological terrorist cell.

Which is why cattle-brokers are forced to kill their entire herd when that happens.

Anti-vaxxer group and social events?
DISEASES 100

Me, Durhon, and Gorm are agreeing on something.

Consider that for a second.

[Thermodolia]

Those with Measles could be banned from flying in five US states

Personally I think we need a national ban and a restriction on people coming into the US with Measles like we did with Ebola

[DARGLED]

Get yourself and your children vaccinated or be quarantined permanently. That is how it should be. You do not have the right to endanger the lives of others.

EDIT: Andrew Wakefield should be executed for having started this antivax madness.

[Farnhamia]

Get yourself and your children vaccinated or be quarantined permanently. That is how it should be. You do not have the right to endanger the lives of others.

EDIT: Andrew Wakefield should be executed for having started this antivax madness.

No advocating death now, you wouldn't want to screw up your nice clean record.

[Aclion]

Those with Measles could be banned from flying in five US states

Personally I think we need a national ban and a restriction on people coming into the US with Measles like we did with Ebola

No, we can't stop people spreading pandemics. It's racist... or something.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

Those with Measles could be banned from flying in five US states

Personally I think we need a national ban and a restriction on people coming into the US with Measles like we did with Ebola

No, we can't stop people spreading pandemics. It's racist... or something.

Well, if they're on the no-fly list... does this mean we gotta confiscate their guns, too?

[Chernoslavia]

1. No it doesn't, being infected and coming into contact with others does.

Which vaccines help prevent. How hard is this?

2. It is very much a fallacy. Or does this mean I can accuse all leftists of being Communists just because they make the same talking points for healthcare and other things?

Communists are leftists though. A leftist is one on the far left. And no it’s not the same because you are literally questioning vaccines.

''Ur just mad bro!'' Geez could you get anymore desperate?

Well you are.

3. Lol is the big bad socialist guy gonna report me to the popos now? Gee, I'm sooo scared! Yeah, pick a number and get in line.

What, you think that socialists don’t like authority like the police?

4. What outlandish claims have I made? I'm not the one thinking they can point guns at people's heads and force them to get vaccinated.

That vaccines don’t work for one, that unvaccinated people don’t cause harm, and that there’s nothing wrong with being anti-vaxx.

I’m not saying that I’d point a gun at people’s head. You said that. I said that those who refuse mandatory vaccination orders will be sent to jail.

My comment is in response to your call for an uprising against the government due to mandatory vaccinations

1. Never said they did.

2. And so are liberals. Just because some fucking British guy somewhere has far-left ideals that doesn't just make liberals over here right wing. And I haven't questioned vaccines, I've questioned Duhon's false claim that it will guarantee to prevent measles and I haven't used that as an argument against being vaccinated.

3. Good, at least you don't pretend to be in support of individual freedom like other socialists do.

4. Then good thing I never said vaccines don't work, or anything about being anti-vax. And no being unvaccinated alone doesn't put anyone in danger.

[Chernoslavia]

Arrest them. They might actually bring with them disease vectors, inanimate and otherwise. These malevolently stupid fuckwits.

Leave this country or stay out of it.