Yes, yes, yes!!
Enjoy
No Jab, No Sway: they’ve gone astray
Have a seat. Let’s see what’s on the news. Perhaps we can get an update on the climate change strike or see if the wars in the Middle East have calmed. Instead, what’s on Channel 7? Meryl Dorey, a notorious anti-vaxxer, preaching about how all vaccines are contaminated and calling parents whose child had died from a vaccine-preventable disease “whining liars”. What a sight to behold!
This is only a microcosm of the beliefs anti-vaxxers follow religiously. Another famous one is the misconception that vaccines cause autism. Time and time again, science has proven this theory to be blatantly wrong. Studies in Denmark involving over 500,000 children have proven that vaccinated children are no more likely than unvaccinated children to develop autism. You can’t dispute scientific facts. Furthermore, the article that first suggested this link between autism and vaccines was retracted and the ‘doctor’ who published it was declared a fraud and lost his medical license. Still, one uninformed article and the whole world goes into a frenzy. Can it get any more 21st century than this?
Now, I get that anti-vaxxers are all for that alternative lifestyle but vaccines aren’t deodorant, you can’t substitute them for essential oils.
Diseases can spread like wildfire in crowded environments like schools and small towns. Take the New South Wales town of Mullumbimby as an example, where “only 52 per cent of five-year-olds … were fully immunised in 2015-2016, compared with 92.9 per cent nationally”. This town actually belongs to a region that initiated the 2009 whooping cough outbreak in Australia. Shock.
Australia is to be commended for its efforts in raising vaccinations rates by enforcing the “No Jab, No Play” policy in 2015. This policy banned unvaccinated children from attending school and cut off welfare payments from families who choose not to vaccinate their children. Whilst this is a great initiative as it essentially forces people to vaccinate, it’s still very restrictive. What about the wealthy non-vaxxers who don’t need any welfare payments? We need a solution that applies to everyone and we need it now, not when a pandemic emerges.
We have officially reached a point where we have to beg people to worry about their health.
They’ve missed the shot on this one.