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May 8, 2007

Needles are your friend

In the Forward this week, Marjorie gets all Jewish on idiots who won't vaccinate their kids.

It’s not just the unvaccinated who are at risk; the more unvaccinated people there are, the more everyone is at risk... Prouser draws a parallel between vaccination and the biblically mandated building of a parapet on every home. The parapet is intended to prevent people from falling off your roof. “Construction of a parapet on a dangerous roof is an undertaking that necessarily involves a measure of risk,” he writes. “The parapet is thus a particularly apt paradigm for immunization, a protective measure deemed obligatory despite a statistical risk incurred in the process.” Prouser also discusses Maimonides’s list of 24 transgressions that are to be met with bans of excommunication. Among them: “One who has something harmful on his property, for example a vicious dog or an unsafe ladder, we place him under a ban until he removes the hazard.” Hey, hippie parents, your unvaccinated kid is a potentially lethal pit bull of germs!

Posted by Daniel Radosh

Comments

I don't happen to be one of them, but the vaccination issue is too complex to dismiss non-vaccinating parents as "idiots."

I might just as well use the term for anyone who says "paradigm" when they mean "analogue."

Well, "douchebags" seemed to strong.

Twits?

Sinners?

Editors?

The main reason many non-idiot parents refrain from vaccinating their kids is because they fear the effects of thimerosal. The pharm companies add thimerosal to vaccines to prevent contamination from multiple needles using the same bottle. Basically, thimerosal is an ethyl mercury-based antiseptic that kills bacteria & other nasties. Single-dose vaccines don't usually contain thimerosal, but then these are much more expensive to produce.

So basically, pharm companies are putting mercury -- among the most powerful neurotoxins -- in vaccines to save money. Some folks speculate that there's a link between thimerosal and autism. There's no real proof of this, but then again, there's no real proof to the contrary.

A non-idiot would have followed the link and read the article to the end:

In the days after this piece was published, several readers pointed out that I neglected to discuss thimerosal, a preservative that was once used in many childhood vaccines. Thimerosol contains mercury, which the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged could theoretically cause “neurodevelopmental disorders,” but not autism. In any case, pediatric vaccines were reformulated between ‘99 and ‘01 to eliminate thimerosol. There was no drop in the number of kids with autism and similar disorders, as one might expect if thimerosol were indeed the culprit.

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