this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican congresswoman and a staunch ally of Trump, suggested a return to "measles parties" for children. She criticized contemporary attitudes towards vaccination, stating, "Now, they demonize parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids."

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[–] themaninblack@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

So arrest and jail her

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 15 points 4 hours ago

Measles parties will kill kids.

MTG is a psychopath.

[–] dwzap@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago

This is a death cult.

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 15 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Arrest her for attempted homicide

[–] protonslive@lemm.ee 4 points 4 hours ago

Laws are not made for the rich and in line. Its made for us. We can complain all we want but we should be able to all see this pattern by now

[–] TylerBourbon@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago

She is massively psycho. She's the same shit stain that harassed teenage survivors of school shootings. Clearly she doesn't give a shit about kids.

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 24 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

They’re not going to learn until they’re charged and convicted of homicide.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 8 points 4 hours ago

The courts are corrupted. It's up to us to hold them accountable.

[–] madcnt@lemm.ee 5 points 13 hours ago

To be honest. They not going to learn until we address the people who enable her. The useful idiots, the ones who promote her for their own gains. Psy ops.

[–] Kalysta@lemm.ee 13 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Thought the bitch was pro life? This seems quite anti-life to me.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 9 points 4 hours ago

Pro-fetus. Anti-life after birth.

[–] AJ1@lemmy.ca 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Thought the bitch was pro life?

That's a question? No, I didn't. Thanks for asking.

[–] Kalysta@lemm.ee 1 points 5 hours ago

I’m being sarcastic. MTG is a disgusting hypocrite no matter how you look at her.

[–] leadore@lemmy.world 49 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

I was a kid when they were first developing the vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella (we called it German measles). So my brothers and I all got every one of them. I remember being sick with them, and with one of the measles types (don't remember which) I was so sick I though I was gonna die. I'll never forget lying there, even thinking of certain things made me puke (or dry heave) so I had to concentrate on not thinking of anything. I remember puking so hard it came out my nose. One of my brothers was so sick, his fever was so high, they took him to the hospital.

Do parents really want to put their children through this instead of a shot? WTF

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 4 points 4 hours ago

Long before there was a vaccine, I developed meningitis from a measles infection. Luckily my parents weren't idiots and took me to the hospital. I ran a high fever, had febrile convulsions and hallucinated. Afterwards, I was over-sensitive to light for at least a week. Anyone who would inflict that on a kid belongs in prison or worse.

[–] RymrgandsDaughter@lemmy.world 15 points 17 hours ago

should be child abuse

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[–] medgremlin@midwest.social 64 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (5 children)

I spent SO MUCH TIME during my pediatrics clinical rotation explaining vaccines to new parents. In some cases, I sat there for a literal hour and debunked myths and conspiracy theories in order to get the parents to consider maybe doing a delayed vaccination schedule. I'm a medical student, so my time is basically worthless and I viewed this as a good use of it, but it was so incredibly frustrating to have to do over and over.

For other folks who know anti-vax parents (new or not), here's the best line of argument I came up with:

Vaccines have been around for a very long time now, and the only changes we've made to them recently is to make them better and safer. The preservatives in them like the mercury compound are perfectly safe, but we've still worked hard to improve the manufacturing process to minimize the need for those preservatives and make the vaccines as pure as possible.

Vaccines are made of little fragments of the virus or bacteria, or a modified, significantly weaker version of the pathogen to give your child's immune system a chance to see it before the real thing shows up. It's like giving your child's immune system a wanted poster or a punching bag to practice on because it has to make special tools to fight each different pathogen.

The reason we load kids up with so many vaccines in the first year or two of life is because their immune systems are still growing and it's an optimal time to introduce things for it to prepare for, and we want to give them some protection of their own before the antibodies from mom run out around 6 to 12 months of life.

We have decades of data showing that vaccines are safe and effective, and the complications and side effects are so minor compared to the problems that can come from the disease. And it's usually around 1000:1 ratio of complications from the disease versus complications from the vaccine, and the vaccine complications are almost always less severe than the complications from the disease.

If you refuse vaccination for your child for reasons besides an anaphylactic allergy to the ingredients, you are gambling your child's life with most of these diseases, and it would have been an entirely preventable death. Vaccines are very hard to make and we have prioritized making vaccines for the diseases that kill children. We don't bother making vaccines for things that are just a nuisance, so the vaccines we have exist for very good reasons. For the most famous example, measles has about 5 different ways it can kill your child that are impossible to treat or prevent once they have it, and many ways to cause permanent damage. The known and most common side effects of the measles vaccine are pretty mild and can be easily treated with medications we have available.

Edit: Fuck it. I've decided that I'm going to use some of my copious (/s) free time writing a children's and parents' book about vaccine safety with this argument. I will self publish if I have to and give it out in family medicine and pediatric clinics if it kills me.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmings.world 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

My explanation is simpler: "The body learns how to fight diseases by eating killed viruses. A vaccine gives you dead viruses, so your body can learn without having to get hurt first. A measles party uses living viruses, so your kid might suffer death or worse."

Then show them the results.

Probably not accurate in detail, but hopefully good enough. If not, then the brevity will let you move onto someone who hasn't abandoned their brain.

[–] medgremlin@midwest.social 3 points 1 hour ago

They see that rash as not that scary, and the rash is honestly the mildest part of the disease. Measles can cause encephalitis (brain swelling) and kill the child, it can cause pneumonia and kill the child, they can recover from the illness and be completely fine for a few years until the virus reactivates and their entire central nervous system becomes intractably inflamed and they seize until they die. And there's nothing we can do about any of those complications besides things like IV fluids or ventilatory support because there are no antiviral medications effective against measles, so we just have to hope the child's immune system wins.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Anti-vax parents should have their kids taken away.

[–] medgremlin@midwest.social 2 points 1 hour ago

The problem with that is that there are already too many children in need of good homes and some of these parents are very good in every other respect. The people who push anti-vax stuff need to be made into public examples, but the rank-and-file believers are usually just well-meaning dupes.

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 19 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Another worth noting is if an antivaxxer says "we don't know what they put into vaccines", respond with "we don't know what they put in painkillers and yet you take them no problem". Nine times out of ten, these antivaxxers would take painkillers willy nilly without question. Saying this makes them question their line of thought. Heck, the same could be said just about anything. We don't know what cooks in restaurants put into the food we ordered, and yet there is no significant movement advocating to stop ordering takeaways or eating outside of home.

[–] medgremlin@midwest.social 1 points 1 hour ago

....except that we do know what gets put in every medication. Every ingredient has to be registered and tested, and if they change the formulation at all, they have to test it again to make sure it's safe.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 3 points 4 hours ago

respond with “we don’t know what they put in painkillers and yet you take them no problem”

But we do know exactly what goes into both.

Saying this makes them question their line of thought.

They don't think. There is no line of thought. They just react to memes with brainless conformity.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 16 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

The sad thing about debunking is that you need to have direct contact with the person under a delusion to build rapport and need to be quite knowledgeable about the topic, but planting the the delusion can be done at a large scale by any eloquent doofus with time to spare. It's so frustrating.

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[–] limelight79@lemm.ee 6 points 18 hours ago

We had our cats in for their annual checkups a few years back, and the vet noted they were due for their vaccinations. The way she said it, we could hear she was bracing for an argument. I wonder if someone had laid into her about it earlier that day.

We, of course, had the vaccinations done, much to her relief.

[–] GladiusB@lemmy.world 22 points 18 hours ago

Jesus Christ she is a fucking moron

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

bet she won't be censured for "decorum violations".

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 14 points 18 hours ago

Grab her and plop her down in the middle of one the hotspots and don't let her out

[–] Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 39 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (9 children)

Just had a thought. What if we took a insignificant amount of the virus and injected it into people. This would allow them to develop antibodies so that if they do become exposed they are ready to fight it.

Probably safer then just exposing people to the virus. Could also do it to enough people that it virtually eradicates the virus.

Just an idea. We would also have to do a bunch of testing and have a bunch of regulations around it. Just to prove there isn't any unwarranted side effects.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 0 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What if we took a insignificant amount of the virus and injected it into people.

That's called vaccination. At least, that was one of the original methods. You can use killed virus, weakened virus, a related virus that triggers the same immune response (for example, cowpox for smallpox), or a selected part of the virus that will trigger the immune response but is not capable of infecting you. The last is the most common method used now because the weakened-virus approach can go badly wrong.

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 4 hours ago

That comment clearly is a joke that references that

[–] Rakudjo@lemmy.world 18 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

If something like that worked, scientists would have done it by now.

Youre right. Sorry. I'm so dumb.

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[–] brezel@piefed.social 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I fully agree, i think all trump voters should go to measles parties.

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