Anti-vaxxers, nature’s greatest mystery

Pierre Marshall under Creative Commons

Anti-vaccine protester carrying a large black board which reads “Kids have a 99.99% survival rate with NATURAL immunity”. The protesters were handing out leaflets to passers-by and put up signs on the construction fences outside Santander bank.

Look, I get it. Anti-Vaxxers believe that they shouldn’t get their children vaccinated due to risks like autism and other stuff. It’s something they believe in and they can’t be convinced otherwise. It’s like trying to convince a Christian that heaven isn’t real…

But that’s because we can’t exactly prove them wrong. We don’t actually know where we go when we die, which sucks. But what we do know is that vaccines DO NOT cause autism. It has been disproven so, so many times for 30 years.

Yet still, somehow, we have all these 40-year-old moms covered in essential oils coming in like “Erm, actually, they do cause autism because…”

It actually hurts to see these guys go outside and riot about how people shouldn’t get vaccines. “They’re harmful to us,” they say. “Don’t put your children in danger,” another says. It’s either the most hilarious or most mind-numbing thing you can see all day.

If anything, once you actually realize this is what they think, it’s just sad. Like, are you serious? You’re doing this to your kid just because someone on Buzzfeed said to? Wow.

It only gets worse once you realize how it all started.

In short, in the late 90’s, a doctor was being paid by a lawyer to create a scare when the newest vaccine came out, said to protect against Measles and other sorts of diseases. What this doctor did was create fake test results showing that kids began developing autism after taking the vaccine. It was posted in the papers, and everyone believed him. That’s when he encouraged them to get individual vaccines instead of the mixed one, which would, in turn, make him and that lawyer much more profit than if they took the mixed one.

A majority of people only stopped once it got disproven like twelve times. Seriously, half the kids in the test weren’t even real, and all the results were faked. The doctor got his license revoked, yet a group of people still stood by his side, which led to where we are today.

And that’s it! That’s the only evidence that anti-vaxxers will point to, despite the fact that the guy conducting it (Andrew Wakefield, by the way) literally lost his license after writing it.

We will never know why people get so close minded about this even after being disproved multiple times. It’s up there with questions like “What is the meaning of life,” “Where do we go when we die,” or “What sort of being gave birth to Andrew Tate?” We’ll never know. Maybe at some point in the future when we’ve spread across the stars and are huddled around the last white dwarf star, we’ll finally figure out why people are this dumb.

What can we do now? In all honesty, I say we just let them continue to believe their fun little fantasy and just sit back and wait for it all to crumble under them.