Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican congresswoman and a staunch ally of Trump, suggested a return to “measles parties” for children. She criticized contemporary attitudes towards vaccination, stating, “Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.”
I spent SO MUCH TIME during my pediatrics clinical rotation explaining vaccines to new parents. In some cases, I sat there for a literal hour and debunked myths and conspiracy theories in order to get the parents to consider maybe doing a delayed vaccination schedule. I’m a medical student, so my time is basically worthless and I viewed this as a good use of it, but it was so incredibly frustrating to have to do over and over.
For other folks who know anti-vax parents (new or not), here’s the best line of argument I came up with:
Edit: Fuck it. I’ve decided that I’m going to use some of my copious (/s) free time writing a children’s and parents’ book about vaccine safety with this argument. I will self publish if I have to and give it out in family medicine and pediatric clinics if it kills me.
Doing the good fight
My explanation is simpler: “The body learns how to fight diseases by eating killed viruses. A vaccine gives you dead viruses, so your body can learn without having to get hurt first. A measles party uses living viruses, so your kid might suffer death or worse.”
Then show them the results.
Probably not accurate in detail, but hopefully good enough. If not, then the brevity will let you move onto someone who hasn’t abandoned their brain.
They see that rash as not that scary, and the rash is honestly the mildest part of the disease. Measles can cause encephalitis (brain swelling) and kill the child, it can cause pneumonia and kill the child, they can recover from the illness and be completely fine for a few years until the virus reactivates and their entire central nervous system becomes intractably inflamed and they seize until they die. And there’s nothing we can do about any of those complications besides things like IV fluids or ventilatory support because there are no antiviral medications effective against measles, so we just have to hope the child’s immune system wins.
Anti-vax parents should have their kids taken away.
The problem with that is that there are already too many children in need of good homes and some of these parents are very good in every other respect. The people who push anti-vax stuff need to be made into public examples, but the rank-and-file believers are usually just well-meaning dupes.
We had our cats in for their annual checkups a few years back, and the vet noted they were due for their vaccinations. The way she said it, we could hear she was bracing for an argument. I wonder if someone had laid into her about it earlier that day.
We, of course, had the vaccinations done, much to her relief.