The internet’s least favourite people are at it again. I’m talking about anti-vaxxers, although now that I think about it, there are a loooooot of people who could fall under the ‘least favourite people’ banner.
Anyway, they reckon that they don’t want to be called anti-vaxxers any more because the term is “derogatory” and “inflammatory.” Almost as inflammatory as telling people that vaccines cause autism I imagine.
The term that they’ve decided on now is “Vaccine Risk Aware”, because according to them, it doesn’t marginalise women or something. I’d read more about the logic behind using this phrase instead of anti-vaxxer, but honestly, I don’t want to go down that particular worm hole of woo insanity.
Obviously, people were pretty quick to call them out on their bullshit. Some suggested more appropriate names would be ‘manslaughter enthusiasts’, ‘pro-death-from-preventable-illness’, and my personal favourite ‘self-indulgent conspiracy theorist divorced from objective reality.’
It’s never a good time to be spouting anti-vaxxer crap, but now is an especially bad time. The entire nation of Samoa is basically shutting down after a measles epidemic has hit the population. Hard.
As I type, the current death toll from measles is 60 – and 52 of those were children under four. Five people have died in the last 24 hours alone.
There are currently vaccination units doing their best to vaccinate everyone in Samoa as quickly as possible, because before the outbreak the vaccination rates for the country were only about 31%.
By the way, Tonga and Fiji are also dealing with measles, but their vaccination rates are a lot higher. No measles deaths have been reported.
So great job, guys. People are dying, most of them little kids, because of your insistence that the government wants to poison us all or whatever the hell it is you reckon. If you have a problem with being called an anti-vaxxer, then here’s a suggestion for you: stop being an anti-vaxxer.
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