Thought For the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Get used to it.
This happens when we allow evil people to steal the 2020 elections.
The worst is yet to come.
Honestly, there needs to be more, not less, anti-vax content. Well, not so much anti-vax, but the truth regarding how we go about making vaccines and modern medicine. The following article is a tad elderly. I found the footnotes to be very interesting, sad, and disturbing.
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We are a society that rejected “pink slime” in chicken nuggests. We seem totally uninterested in what seems to support modern medicine.
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The Ethics of HEK 293, by Alvin Wong, MD, published in 2006 in the the National Catholic Bioethics Center:
. https://www.pdcnet.org/C1257D43006C9AB1/file/5265B61D5497F52585257D94004802BB/$FILE/ncbq_2006_0006_0003_0077_0099.pdf
“We” didn’t reject pink slime (beef, BTW, not chicken) some PR creeps that hate anything safe, affordable and enjoyable made a scare and freaked out some other PR creeps and declared we’d done so.
Pointing out, accurately, people’s objections to some vaccines has been called anti-vaxx, but so has accurate descriptions of how they work and in many memorable instances direct quotes from the Informed Consent papers you have to sign when GETTING the vaccines…..
For the record, vis-Ã -vis, me and the jab. With my long history (over 20 years) of thrombocytopenia (extended low count at 50K, highest level at 100K ceiling), I would possibly share the fate of that Miami doctor and others with no prior history. Me agreeing to the jab would be potential suicide; me forced to be jabbed would be murder.
In retrospect the way that “anti-vaxx” has been conflated to mean both “denial that vaccines work, or that they ever do more good than harm” with “suspicion over a handful of specific experimental vaccines/gene treatments” was inevitable. Most people are not deep thinkers. They hear “anti-vaxx” as “anti-vaccine” and they hear the news call the new treatments “THE vaccine” and natural they think that anti-vaxx means any resistance to THOSE vaccines.
This is part of why the right has lost so much ground in the cultural war. Our natural reaction is to say “okay but actually anti-vaxx never meant that you had to automatically take every single vaccine without considering the pros and cons.” But such an argument only reaches people who are going to be weighing those pros and cons in the first place. Most people will simply hear “he says he isn’t anti-vaxx, but he isn’t taking the vaccine, so he’s an idiot or crazy.”
Rhetoric is important. And rhetoric is made much easier when you have constant repetition in the media.
Honestly, the bigger problem I see is two varieties:
Stupid Media Person(s) says something stupid, and then when it is mocked it gets attributed to the other side (Vaccines cause autism, Defund The Police)
The media misreports what people actually said.
(so fetal stem lines become ‘dead babies in vaccine’ and recognizing that among the known if rare side-effects of approved vaccines are immune reactions which cause serious neurological damage becomes ‘vaccines cause autism’)
The previously strong control over sources of information made this kind of false-witness much more possible.