Obama and Vaccines
“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” Obama said at a Pennsylvania town-hall style campaign stop in April 2008. “Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.”
To be fair, when you watch the video he ended by explaining how important vaccines are. Also, since then he has changed his tune about the autism link. Listen, anyone can be fooled. I think Obama is a smart dude. I don’t love his policies but that doesn’t mean anything about his intelligence. In 2008, he was even snowed by the anti-vaccine lunatics. Why? Because there was no push back. Now if you look at social media, like Facebook, you will see they are getting hammered. Before, the anti-vaccine brigade had more control and even convinced some celebrities. Today, you get more and more pages like this. It’s about time.
Well said, both of you.
It’s unfortunate that there seems to be a “political” angle developing on this lately, with a few politicians from the right making boneheaded statements:
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/paul-repeats-baseless-vaccine-claims/
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/02/politics/chris-christie-vaccines/
What we DON’T need is for this to become another blue/red issue…
It is not about vaccines. It is about people who, given the birthright into a society with the greatest-ever possibilities for the future, turn away from maturity and intelligence, preferring to be herded than to be free.
“Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
And underlings we are. The mood has shifted – there is now a wave of rage against those mommies who did not vaccinate their children against the common childhood diseases. We are working up a good lynch-mob rage against them.
They are fools, sure. They are no more fools today then they were five or ten years ago, when they listened to some spurious authority that said not to vaccinate children. But so are the fools that wish to string them up and punish them for being fools. We are too lazy as a culture to do anything but believe the lies we are fed, that we gobble up – and then we bray loudly about being fooled.
We each choose whether to be no better than this, or to stand on our hind limbs and be courageous, to reason and think, to merit the name of our species – sapiens, thinking. If we go extinct, it is evolution’s way of showing that we are too damn stupid for our own good.