Whenever people are high-and-mighty and start wrongly throwing accusations, I find that they're almost always guilty of projection.
(Meaning, it isn't that their accusations and the problems they describe come out of nowhere. It's that they perfectly describe what they themselves are guilty of -- probably because they're aware of it on a subconscious level.)
With vaccines I never really clearly saw where the projection was.
I'm talking about the people who get antsy and paranoid and worried about the people who don't choose to vaccinate. Who believe not vaccinating is a threat to public health and contributes to the chance of epidemic or everyone getting wiped out.
In general I've always found those people to be weird. To think that band-aids and potions would be a meaningful aspect of how healthy you are, but typically not have the same concern for long-term stuff like diet and exercise and positive mental and emotional stimuli etc. And then to worry about what everyone else is doing, and regard other peoples' health choices as their business.
It seems obviously screwy and on the wrong track. But I wasn't sure exactly where the projection was, or where their line of thinking breaks down.
Most things like this come down to short-term vs long-term. The vaccine pushers essentially bring a Keynesian mind to public health. They have the control-freak mentality of believing it's viable to manage all variables, and in their lust to do whatever might make things more comfortable today, they hurt the underlying condition and make bad outcomes more likely long-term.
What the #coronavirus reminds us (shout out to all those affected) is that we don't perfectly know every strain of disease that exists, or that potentially could exist tomorrow.
Vaccines are of course not possible when it comes to fending off things that showed up out of nowhere. Like anything, it's more dynamic than the control freaks believe.
I've posted before about how wild it is to me that these cupcakes worry so much about measles (and write scare stories on CNN.com etc), when it's so unlikely that you'll get it, we know how to treat it, and measles is basically a bad flu.
I had a bad flu a few weeks ago. It sucked. Look at me now.
I feel like new strains that we didn't see coming would have to be the most meaningful risks to us. Things that we necessarily won't have much info about or history of treating. (Really, man-made deliberately installed attacks are probably the biggest risks.)
In these cases, the best defense is having a healthy condition and a strong natural immune response. The more you vaccinate (the more you worry about measles etc and play god to your body's natural mechanism), the more you disturb your underlying ability to fend things off.
You're less likely to get the flu, but you're more likely to catch and spread in a high leverage spot. Thanks.
Consider that if there's a mad scientist evil element out there hoping to create a strain of disease that would wipe out a meaningful chunk of humanity, they absolutely love it when people vaccinate. They know what those vaccinations are and can very simply work around them, and now the landscape burns more easily.
What would thwart them the most -- and give them less reason to try -- is if people have a stronger underlying condition and a better underlying immune response.
The way people vaccinate today (a handful of things, once in a while) probably isn't too awful.
Maybe pushing it on your baby at a super young age because you saw a scare story on CNN is kind of bad.
But the ideology is awful. If these people really had their way and we really went along with their line of thinking, presumably we'd vaccinate for so much more, at earlier and earlier ages. If you push enough on the string it becomes a vicious cycle where our natural immune response grows weaker and we're increasingly dependent on vaccines for more and more things.
Which might sound manageable and not that bad, until something we didn't anticipate shows up, and now it spreads like a wildfire.
There's a great allegory to all this that we can find in the earlier days of my blog here at steemit.org:
I look ahead to the intersection and there's a countdown, under 20 seconds left to cross. I hate waiting in red lights. And I want to eat the fries while they're hot. So I start riding quick, and as the sidewalk curves, as I get close to the road and need to slow down, I feel my breaks aren't working (WTF?), and in a moment of reflex I voluntarily offer myself into the bush.
Presumably all the stuff I was carrying was causing some sort of user error, and I probably would have sorted it out in a second or two. But still, I like my decision to ride into the bush.
You have to get scathed once in a while.
If you try to go through life too cleanly, it's a bigger downside when something does finally go wrong. If I pass the bush and try my luck at entering the street, it probably works out ok, but there's a chance a car doesn't see me and we all have a bad day. I'd rather just take the sure thing and crash into the bush.
The Keynesian mind would want to avoid crashing into the bush and we'd see what happens in the street.
(And I mean the Keynesian, control-freak, emotionally troubled by the thought of any downturn, everyone needs to vaccinate for measles or I'll be triggered mind. It's all the same.)
I bet the germaphobes who wash the grocery cart before they touch it and always need everything sanitized are the most frequently sick people. They'll be less likely to get sick today, but long-term the people who touch the carts are building more immunities to more things, and are habitually exercising their body's immune response and keeping it sharp.
So in a nutshell what happens is the vaccine crowd is probably less likely to catch the specific things they vaccinated for, but are worse off against everything else, including all the high-leverage serious risks like a new strain of disease.
Their behavior makes it more likely for a big epidemic to spread.
If the chance of getting things that are on par with the flu is emotionally troubling to you and you want to avoid it at all costs, I can understand that. But you should recognize that that's what you're doing, so that you don't have an unresolved conflict where you have to accuse the long-term oriented people of being dangerous. (You're dangerous, if anything.)
Depth chart (most kooky to least):
1.) Keynesians
2.) High and mighty vaccine pushers
3.) Climate change hysterics who eat meat and drive cars
4.) SJWs
5.) People who make "meat-based carrots" because they're triggered by veggie burgers
note: If taking vaccines seems like the right choice for you, you should do it. I'm not your doctor and it goes without saying that I'm not qualified to determine that for you. Personally I haven't been to a doctor in literally 20 years, so by default vaccinating just isn't something that crosses my mind, rather than I'm dead-set against it.
Vaccinating for certain things like STDs whenever that's available actually seems appealing to me, at least given how cumbersome and out-of-the-moment condoms can be.
On an individual level I think it's unlikely to really matter anyways. We're talking about small edges and small likelihoods, which accumulate into mattering if enough people did it wrong.
Everyone making the choice that seems best for them is a wonderful thing and I fully support it. (Please have that same consideration for others who choose differently than you.) And that's essentially all I stand for on this topic. That the best outcome emerges when people are free and feel truly comfortable to choose what they think is best.
What I disdain is when you try to guilt or pressure or legally force a decision upon others. That's where you become the problem.