Melanie’s Marvelous Measles…

…is a piece of junk written by an anti-vax kook of the Survival of the Fittest mold. These are the nuts who urge that we all just go ahead and expose our kids the disease that used to kill children by the millions, cuz that will strengthen the breed.

I’m not linking to the thing because I have no desire to help promote dangerous quackery.  But I am noting that the book has inspired an epic display of a new genre of literature that I am coming to appreciate: the Amazon Review.

People write me to weep that I can’t change the mind of somebody like the dangerous fool who wrote this book by mockery.  Dude, you could not change the mind of the person who wrote this book with brain surgery.  I have no interest in attempting to change the minds of True Believers in the anti-vax movement.  As has been show, when you present such people with facts and reality, they dig in rather than listen.

So I appeal, not to them, but to people who are in danger of getting suckered by them.  Books like this, and their authors, should be made as socially radioactive as the KKK.  It’s one thing to be confused about the subject as a newbie and need to learn the information because you’ve been spooked by something you heard on the vast rumor mill of the Interwebz. For such people I have abundant empathy and I refer them to simple, easy to understand resources which explain why vaccines are an essential first line of defense against the return of diseases that were a scourge through the history of the human race. Similarly, for those troubled by fears about the morality of using unethically sourced vaccines,  I point to clear information about the morality and efficacy of vaccines and our moral responsibility to use them. For most people, that is sufficient.  But for some, the prideful urge to press on with deliberate lies like “vaccines did not wipe out polio” and even “FDR pretended to  have polio” crosses a line from sincere desire to know the truth into dangerous quackery.  There is such a thing as willed ignorance and dangerous kooks like this, who menace my grand-daughters with their folly, should be shamed into the same dark hole that white supremacists or or flat earthers live in.

Listen to Roald Dahl, who lost his daughter Olivia to measles in 1962.