One way to make a point about vaccinations…
That was posted on Facebook by an Australian anti-vax group. The SMH reports
:
It is not the first time the group has made the same comparison. In a tweet in January 2011, the group compared a court ordering a five-year-old girl to be vaccinated to “court orders rape of a child”.
Almost immediately, supporters of the group expressed their disgust, with one commentator, Rachelle Taylor, posting: “This is disgusting. Are you saying you believe your child being immunised is as bad as your child being raped? This could also be very triggering for victims of sexual assault.”
The group responded to one comment on its page, defending its decision to liken vaccines to sexual assault.
“This post isn’t tasteless – it is honest. What truly IS tasteless is our elected government trying to tell us that we have to vaccinate our children even if we don’t believe it is best for their health,” the group said.
Right. What if you believed rape was best for your children’s health? How tasteless would it be if the government told you you couldn’t do that.
In January, a nation-wide lecture tour from American anti-vaccine doctor Sherri Tenpenny was cancelled after pressure from doctors and medical groups forced most venues to cancel their bookings for the lectures. The AVKN has strongly supported her aborted tour.
The group was forced to change its name from the ‘Australian Vaccination Network’ over repeated claims the name was misleading.
The New South Wales Fair Trading Department received complaints about its name, with the Australian Medical Association stating it sounded like it could be a government agency.
Despite challenging a direction to change its name, the Administrative Decisions Tribunal forced the group to find a new title.
Oh yes? The Facebook group is still called that.
I’ll be in my happy place. There are puppies there. Unfortunately, there’s also someone screaming “What the actual fuck?!” over and over…. that guy should leave.
Some people do and the government does. I don’t hear many complaints about that. I don’t understand this reversal of the analogy. I also don’t find the original analogy all that bad. Plenty of people find injections objectionable, even when they agree to them.
Perhaps an analogy to abortion would be more appropriate. Who gets the right to determine what goes/stays in your body? You or society?
I can understand situations where the risk to the public health is sufficient to justify such an intrusion into matters of personal choice. I don’t think we are quite there. But then again, nobody is suggesting that all adults have to get their measles booster or demonstrate immunity.
I don’t consider vaccine requirements for public school attendance to be an unreasonable constraint to put on parents who choose not to vaccinate. Which seems to be what a lot of this issue is about.
Nope. Fuck that. I’m out.
If someone created a poster or ad calling unvaccinated kids “the next patient zero”, the anti-vaxxers would freak out and file lawsuits. They would claim their kids are being demonized and traumatized, yet a “patient zero” or “typhoid Mary” message would be far more accurate than what the anti-vaxxers are saying.
Unlike the “vaccination = rape” poster, unvaccinated five year olds are not old enough to comprehend nor be traumatized. And it’s the anti-vaxxer parents who are endangering those five year olds, not a government nor strangers.