this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
564 points (97.5% liked)
Funny: Home of the Haha
6030 readers
92 users here now
Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.
Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Other Communities:
-
/c/[email protected] - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/[email protected] - General memes
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hate memes like this, it’s as stupid and harmful as the “If you even look marijuana once you’ll end up selling your body for crack a week later” crap from the 1990s. And it’s stupid and harmful for the same reasons.
The reality is that the vast majority of antivax kids will be perfectly fine and never get any major vaccine-preventable Illness, and even if they do they’ll probably be ok. And that’s why memes like this are harmful. People on the fence can easily observe that these claims are false, that the anti-vax kids are not getting sick, and that can push them into becoming anti-vax themselves.
I remember being incredibly jealous of my sister, because she got the chicken pox vaccine and I (born six years too soon to receive it) did not. Spending a week covered in itchy legions, bathing in oatmeal, and running a horrible fever sucked ass.
"Perfectly fine" is such cowardly bullshit. You're inflicting undue pain and suffering on people entirely because you've shoved the misery of your own childhood illnesses down the memory hole.
People who are on the fence have been terrified with fearmongering and pacified with placebos. They've been systematically lied to and they still aren't sold, precisely because contagious diseases still regularly torment our friends and loved ones.
This shit is the same exact propaganda I remember the fucking smokers' lobby puffing up people's asses decades ago. Hell, I heard it from Comedy Legend Bill Hicks live, back when he was on his "Why can't I smoke anymore?" arc. Then he got pancreatic cancer and completely changed his tune. Too late, because the disease put him in the ground at the tender age of 32.
But a congo line of "Why can't I smoke any more?" comedians rolled up right behind his hearse, churning out that slop for a solid ten more years before so many of them were playing pallbearer to their friends and family that the jokes couldn't land anymore.
To add, this only works if the majority of the population is vaccinated. Herd immunity is a real thing, but for us (and the things we vaccinated against) it isn't achieved through mass infection. It's through majority adoption of vaccination.
Sure, kids who don't get vaccinated have been fine in the very recent past, but only because everyone else has had vaccines. We're starting to see this slipping in lots of "1st world" countries. People see kids not being vaccinated and being ok, because the majority of people are vaccinated. So more people don't vaccinate their kids. Now we're getting mass outbreaks of measles, and people who have legitimate medical reasons preventing them from getting vaccinated are at extreme risk.
I'd love to say let them Darwin themselves out of our hair, but that's not how it works.
Smfh...just so stupid.