> That's not actually how the measles thing happens.> What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine.
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
- ask really annoying and interesting questions
- etc.
3/16/2026
at
9:55:41 AM
So there are two separate issues here.One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
by AnthonyMouse
3/16/2026
at
11:16:12 AM
In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't.But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races.
The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time.
Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie.
Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem.
But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.
by ourmandave
3/16/2026
at
7:57:27 PM
Let's not pretend that nothing was being censored during COVID or that no one remembers it. The backlash is the primary reason we ended up with RFK.There is also an extent to which problems can be solved in other ways. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuitively bad and conjures images of 19th century quacks. So all you have to do is use a different preservative. Then you have a one-line killshot any time anyone brings it up -- there's no mercury anymore -- and you don't have to try to explain statistical sample sizes to people who failed high school math.
by AnthonyMouse