• raynethackery@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Only when enough of these ant-vaxxers lose children to these diseases will they reverse course. Then they will blame the experts again for not warning them. I have a 2 yo great-nephew and I shudder to think of him getting some disease that we were close to wiping out. Are there no people left alive that remember polio?

      • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Would you like to know more?

        On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had located and killed Osama Bin Laden. The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Why not just vaccinate them for real if you were doing this.

          You can still get the DNA and have an ulterior motive and also not 100% trash any credibility, you’d still trash it but nowhere near as bad.

          • SheeEttin
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            11 months ago

            They did vaccinate for real too. (Also that was Hep B, not polio, not that it makes a difference.)

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Pretty sure if I was from that part of the world I would still get vaccinated. It isn’t like the vaccine killed you, it was fake.

          • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            You have no idea what you’re talking about.

            Did you miss what happened in the US starting in 2020? A major political party convinced a massive swath of the American population to refuse to take any actions to avoid the spread of a disease. This is a highly educated, highly connected, wealthy population in a (sort of) democracy, and you had incidents of violence and murder occurring over a weaponized and mythologized version of reality pushed by religious extremists and the far right. Now picture a community in Pakistan that does not have that education, the level of political and religious freedom, or that access to information. We saw the same dynamic play out in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

            Except in this case, the CIA was actively involved. Imagine 2022 if it turned out that Biden’s vaccination program turned out to be run by Chinese Ministry for State Security and they were using the program as a way of gathering intelligence on Americans. As it was you had armed militias and paramilitary groups seizing statehouses and plotting kidnappings and political murders.

            So maybe you would be that one brave soul in a deep red Alabama town who wears their mask despite being assaulted, getting spit on, and having their family threatened. It’s statistically unlikely, but maybe you’re just the type of person who would walk down the street in the same town dressed head to heels in drag knowing you’re going to get beat up, if you’re lucky. It just means that your brain - your physical brain - is wired up differently. Congratulations - maybe go join Doctors Without Borders or something.

            The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have been long barred from participating in aid programs to prevent this very thing. They wouldn’t even allow agency people to retire and join government aid agencies without a significant waiting period. It’s the same reason it was considered very outside of bounds for intelligence officers to pose as members of the press. It puts lives in danger. The US has dispatched foreign medical aid using uniformed military assets, but it is done openly. A naval ship will pull up with medical equipment, field hospitals will be set up, and so on.

            Anything else gets people killed - both the aid workers and the community whose distrust forces them to reject the aid.

    • Akuchimoya@startrek.website
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      11 months ago

      You’re too optimistic. Anti-vaxxers can and do still blame everyone and everything else before changing their minds. Only select few will have the awareness to change. People were literally on their deathbeds dying of covid still cursing the doctors who were supposedly killing them. The children and other people they spread to, they don’t deserve to die. But I have no patience left for contrarian wilful assholes, they deserve(d) their deaths.

    • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      Only when enough of these ant-vaxxers lose children to these diseases will they reverse course

      They absolutely won’t. This is a group of people willing to put their kids through ‘treatments’ like chelation, HBOT and bleach enemas to get rid of ‘the toxins’ and kids have died from some of these alternative treatments. All that their own kids dying guarantees is a spot as a parent-martyr on some antivaxx podcast and a handshake from Jenny McCarthy.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The interesting thing about polio, is if I understand it right, it’s very similar to covid in terms of what a non serious case looks like in additon to asymptomatic people. It would easily be brushed off as not serious.

      If Polio killed people like covid, and didn’t give the public the chance to see the damage it does with all these paralyzed people on the streets, I don’t know if we’d ever have a chance of stopping it.

      It’s hard to argue with kids in wheelchairs vs deaths of people you don’t know.

    • SheeEttin
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      11 months ago

      I’ve met someone who had polio when he was a kid, and that was probably not more than 70 years ago. He had very little use of his legs. His party trick was twisting his lower leg around at the knee so that he could put his drink down on the sole of his shoe.