So I was talking to a friend of mine who works for the health department the other day. She's having trouble getting people to accept vaccinations for themselves and their children. This is a problem.
Thanks to globalization, air travel has increased and communicable diseases are spreading faster than they have since the time of the black death. Your children are being exposed to deadly diseases that were once eradicated in the US like Tuberculosis and Whooping Cough.
Everything you've read about how vaccines are evil is wrong. If you think vaccines are dangerous, you've been lied to. In this diary, I'll show you why.
Vaccines contain Mercury!
No, but some of them contained Ethylmercury.
That's still mercury!
Yeah, and salt is a poisonous gas that explodes in contact with water. People who think that this is a problem forgot everything they learned in high school chemistry. So here it is: easy chemistry.
Salt is sodium chloride. Sodium which has reacted with chlorine. Chlorine is mustard gas. It's the stuff that was fired into trenches in WWI and ate people alive from the inside out. If you want the best description of how horrible that stuff is, go read Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen.
Sodium is a metal that catches on fire and explodes when it touches water.
That was a piece of metal that floated on water because the water underneath it was boiling. Also, water is denser, but nevermind that, you just watched water set metal on fire until it exploded.
Sodium is incredibly reactive. It will react with just about anything in order to form a more stable substance. To explain the difference between stability and reactivity, a candle will release more energy (in BTUs) than a stick of dynamite. But the candle does it slowly, because wax is incredibly stable, whereas dynamite is the opposite of stable. Unstable things want to react. Stable things do not.
This explosion doesn't happen in ocean water (or your mouth for that matter) because Salt is not a poisonous gas that explodes when it contacts water, salt is stable. Sodium is unstable, as demonstrated. Chlorine gas will eat your face and lungs because it is unstable and wants to react all over your exposed soft bits. Salt, on the other hand, is something that your body will die for lack of. You need a basic level of salt to survive. (But if you're an American, you're probably set, so I wouldn't worry.)
The reason mercury is bad is because pure quicksilver wants to react with your soft bits just like chlorine gas does, and even worse, quicksilver wants to stick around afterward. But if you take mercury and make it react with other things before you put it in your body, you get a completely different substance. In the same way that Salt isn't a poisonous gas that explodes when it touches water, Ethylmercury isn't toxic thermometer juice.
But none of this matters because, thanks to the scaremongers, they stopped using Ethylmercury a decade ago.
[A Note to the Science Nerds: I know I oversimplified all of this. I don't want to get into valence electrons and redox reactions and bioaccumulation and all that because that would be waaaaaaay to complicated. And besides, ethylmercury doesn't do any of that. It's stable, and it doesn't bioaccumulate.]
By the way, if you decide that you'll never eat anything with salt in it ever again because it might suddenly explode in your mouth and eat your eyeballs, I can promise you that it doesn't work that way. But if you're that paranoid, you can test it by sprinkling some of your salt into a glass of water just to make sure it's safe. [Protip: It will always be safe. Go ahead, test it. Test it as many times as you want.]
Vaccines cause Autism and Sids!
No they don't. They really don't. There's been not a single shred of evidence that suggests that they do. The scaremongers who wrote reports linking the two were forced to recant their argument seven years ago. Rates of SIDS have gone down since vaccinations began to the tune of 40 percent. Still, this lie keeps repeating no matter how much evidence is stacked up to the contrary.
But I was watching Oprah, and-
Ask yourself: If all of science says that vaccines are safe and necessary, who would benefit from stirring up lies about vaccines?
Who benefits from painting vaccines as unsafe? The main group I can think of is the Pharmaceutical Companies themselves. Considering that it's the government that buys vaccines so Big Pharma is guaranteed sales either way, it's in their interest to scare the everliving crap out of you so that your kid comes down with an ultra deadly disease and you and/or your insurance company end up spending thousands of dollars on expensive and exotic medicines. They already have a guaranteed sale to the government, but they can turn that into even more money by scaring you into exposing your kid to something deadly.
They collude with so-called medical professionals all the damn time. It's part of their marketing strategy. The government already buys the vaccines from them. They are guaranteed vaccine sales. So by investing a tiny amount of money in some hack and getting him to write a book about how vaccines will kill everyone, and then using their influence to get the guy on Oprah, they've scared you into endangering your children for their profit. By paying other people to write articles for peer-reviewed medical journals, they add the appearance of validity to these claims.
In fact, the author of the only report linking vaccines with autism was funded by people who asked him to link autism with vaccines. He was paid to lie to you. That was his job. Despite the fact that he was proven to be a liar, people still believe that vaccines will give your kids autism. They wont.
Clarification: [This is not to suggest that most Doctors operate on this level or cooperate with collusion. Many of them report violations to regulators. Peers reviewing the Autism report were furious. But they, the good, and loud majority of medical professionals, were ignored in favor of an illegitimate quack who was being paid to lie to people. It astounds me that a report that scientists knew was wrong became such an explosive thing that is still believed. Perhaps it's just the anti vaccination movement proliferating lies, but there's a lot of funding behind the anti-vax movement, and I'm very suspicious.]
This is a basic tactic used by people with a platform to scare people into doing stupid, stupid things they would never do if they took the time to actually research it. That's how we got into the Iraq war. That's how we got scared into letting Ari Fleisher tell us all to watch what we say.
All that being said, sometimes vaccines have scary side effects. I'm not interested in scaring you into making the right decision. You really don't have to take my word for any of this. But please, do the research, don't trust organic food blogs for medical advice, listen to doctors and scientists, and you'll see that all the evidence is there for vaccines, and none of this scary stuff you've heard is true. Yes, fever, and if there's an allergic reaction, convulsions have occurred very, very rarely. But the side effects are never as bad as the actual disease itself, most of which can leave your child permanently disabled or dead. A scary experience is less bad than permanently disabled or dead. They don't make vaccines for diseases that aren't incredibly deadly. Remember, with all the global travel and immigration, these diseases are coming here in droves. Whooping Cough is back. Malaria occasionally pops up in Florida.
What I'm saying is that vaccines could help save your child's life. That's why they exist. If a vaccine is available, it's because people nearby have caught a horrible disease. They don't give out the polio vaccine anymore, because polio isn't occurring. The same is true of smallpox. If the vaccine is there, it's because there is a danger your child may die if they contract the disease, and there are significant outbreaks of the disease in the United States (or wherever you happen to be).
But I read that someone's child died after a vaccination once!
Maybe that happened, but I didn't find a reoputable news article. I have no reason to believe that it's impossible for such a thing to happen. I don't know that it hasn't. But I do know that 164,000 people died after contracting measles in 2008, most of them very young children. If your child catches measles, and lives, you could still be responsible for the death of an immunodeficient child.
Whooping cough killed ten infants in California last year, and the CDC reports that there are more cases in the US of Whooping Cough today then there have been since the '40s.
Out of the literally billions of people who've been Innoculated against measles, mumps, and whooping cough, a handful may have died, but I can't find any news articles about those deaths. I found blog posts, but no news. Meanwhile millions died in the last decade for want of vaccines.
Children in this country die every year from preventable diseases for which there are vaccines. For every single blog post about some kid dying from a vaccine, I could find you ten news articles for a kid who died because they weren't vaccinated. So no matter how many reports they post, even accurate ones, I promise you I have more than they do.
Do the research. Disbelieve the disinformation. Vaccinate your children.