Is it an outbreak of measles in the DR Congo, or a pandemic?
DR Congo measles: Nearly 5,000 dead in major outbreak
Measles has killed nearly 5,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019, authorities said, after the disease spread to all the provinces in the country.
Close to a quarter of a million people have been infected this year alone.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the world’s largest and fastest-moving epidemic.
How strange that anti-vaxxers are silent about this. Is it because they don’t want to admit that vaccinations stop disease? Or is it because it’s “them” who are infected?
Yes, I’m suggesting that racism plays a motivating factor in the mindset of anti-vaxxers. Almost all countries with a strong “anti-vaxxer movement” are predominantly white with the exceptions of Brazil and Japan (which are large economic powers). Many of them in the US are in white, middle class “traditional families”. I found it utterly laughable back in September when they called themselves “the new civil rights movement”, especially when many of them would likely have opposed the civil rights movement had they been around in the 1960s.
Anti-vaxxers aren’t demanding everyone stop receiving vaccines. What they want is “my freedumb!” for individuals to opt out – and the continued vaccination of “others”. They want people not like themselves – immigrants and people in other countries – to be vaccinated so that anti-vaxxers are safe. Just not them.
“What they want is “my freedumb!” for individuals to opt out – and the continued vaccination of “others”.” Interesting. I have yet to find a single example of a person convinced that vaccination practice is completely dismissive of any concern for review of outcomes – but would promote the practice under current use of children as a target of multiple simultaneous challenges to the immune system under the rubric of ‘strengthening it’. That must be moral support of the idea that “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – a premise for adventure fiction totally unsupported by sensible examination. Meanwhile allergic reactions run amok – and are alleged to be ‘coincidence.’ They certainly are.
Ahem. When I was a kid there were vaccines based on whole organisms – a single vaccine of such type designed for a single disease presented orders of magnitude more diverse challenges to the immune system than combinations of single antigens found in present days vaccines designed for protection against several diseases.