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I Vaccinate My Kids and I Swear I’m Not Selling Anything. Can We Be Friends?
I’m starting this one off with a “Birdbox” reference, because that sure is still relevant! Everyone on the planet watched it at precisely the same time on December 21, 2018, so I’m not worried about spoiling anything for the good people of Ricochet.
Just in case you happened to be wrapping Christmas presents or watching Fox News instead of checking out the new Sandra Bullock movie on Netflix, if you’ve seen M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” or John Krasinski’s “The Quiet Place,” you’ve basically seen “Birdbox.” On the surface, it’s a post-apocalyptic horror movie about a woman who is blindly searching for a safe haven in a world where most of humanity has been compelled to commit mass suicide by a “creature” that’s a death sentence to lay eyes on. But Sandra Bullock has spoken about what the film means to her in interviews, explaining that it’s very much about parenthood. The themes are solid enough; the furious and swift rapids she frantically navigates, the shreds of safety and reliable rules she grasps at, the moments where blind faith is the only terrifying option and she is forced to trust an indifferent force of nature to deliver her family. Almost everything in “Birdbox” can be blatantly or metaphorically guided back to the central theme of parenthood.
Theme is crucial for horror. Often, so is the tenet that when characters are dealing with a monster, there needs to be a kind of logic to it. The vampire only comes out at night and can be killed by a stake in the heart. The werewolf only comes out during the full moon, and is exclusively but unfailingly downed by a silver bullet. The Martians can descend at any time, but if they contract the common cold, they drop like flies. “Birdbox” seems to be setting up a monster that follows a pretty straightforward set of rules at first (you see it, you off yourself), but one widely criticized aspect of the film is the fact that seemingly out of nowhere, at roughly the point where Act II begins, the characters and audience learn that not everyone is affected this way by the creatures.
Rather than immediately committing suicide by whatever means are at hand, there are some individuals who witness the creatures, grow euphoric as they are filled with the glory of the revelation, and become obsessed with forcing all who resist to look. From a storytelling perspective, it makes sense to introduce an element to create some conflict once the characters have basically figured out that they’ll be fine if they just stay inside with the curtains drawn, but going back to Bullock’s parallels, if the creatures represent those things that can hurt our children, ranging from harsh truths to human traffickers to war and disease and ruin, what do the newly minted cultists represent with regards to the theme of parenthood?
The first time I watched Birdbox, I knew. There was no philosophical moment of thought, no hesitation as I really took the opportunity to mull over every facet and possibility.
Good grief, they’re selling MLM Products. That’s what they represent.
Multi-Level Marketing companies insist, vehemently, that they are not pyramid schemes. This is technically true, because there is usually a product being exchanged for the participant’s hard-earned money. That being said, companies like Mary Kay, Lularoe, Herbalife, Perfectly Posh and Pure Romance have gained a certain level of notoriety for seeming innocuous enough but becoming really annoying really quickly when someone you know gets involved. Suddenly, every trip to Sephora is taking a sales opportunity away from your friend who sells makeup, and every time you turn down an invitation to a sales party, you are not being a supportive influence. The dirty secret, of course, is that the product, while real, is window dressing for the true moneymaker: recruiting. You can sell all the 3-D fiber mascara or bedroom tingle jelly in your inventory, and the effort-to-profit ratio is still extremely underwhelming. Of course, the modern MLM relies on weaving the illusion of booming success through social media, with Facebook and Instagram posts crowing about huge paychecks and lavish lifestyles in the hopes of intriguing acquaintances just enough to sign up. And if you do, you’re almost guaranteed to fail, because a whopping 99% of individuals who attempt multi-level marketing involvement lose money on the endeavor. If you’re lucky, it’s only $100 or so for a basic Younique starter package. If you’re not, it’s family-ruining levels of crushing debt and a garage full of unmovable inventory. If you’re extremely unlucky, it’s inventory that has an expiration date.
The business model still has its devotees, in spite of the gutting numbers. Fewer family lifestyle choices are as divisive as Multi-Level Marketing. Vaccination comes close, and I don’t believe it’s a tremendous coincidence that many of the people who love Norwex and Young Living also love to turn their children into modern Typhoid Marys. The common strain is that women, and specifically mothers, are statistically more likely to buy into both the anti-vaxx movement and get drawn into a multi-level marketing company, so there’s bound to be some overlap. Rather than use any kind of cheap and sexist rhetoric to explain this, I believe that much of it just comes down to the fact that while parenting is an incredibly important job, it’s not a tremendously respected one. Being able to rattle off anecdotes about vaccine side effects or running your own “business” creates a sense of exclusive knowledgeability and authority, something that many adult humans who spend the majority of their time with irrational screaming demons crave. It’s as understandable as it is deeply sad. Most mothers of young children today are also millennials, which means that they’re already the butt of many jokes painting them as frivolous, immature and dumb. The rhetoric spun by MLMs is carefully engineered to give an individual feeling judged, stressed, and inadequate the belief they have the potential for power. Income, productivity, and entrepreneurial spirit are all fetishized by our society, and MLM pitches make it sound so easy to have it all and really do the right thing for your family. And the families of others you love, of course, provided they’re willing to see the light.
Recently I found some other local mothers of toddlers on Facebook and we organized an impromptu playdate for our kids, and it was interesting to see how gingerly everyone proceeded when we finally met up at an area bounce house. While our children played, the moms all engaged in light small talk, gently and politely probing, and it was amazing how as conversations split off and grew a little deeper and more intimate, the ice was smashed apart the moment these issues came up. Once “we vaccinate” and “I am not trying to sell you anything or recruit you for my downline” were out of the way, the path ahead to developing genuine and long-lasting connections suddenly seemed possible and exciting. Another very important element that anti-vaxx sentiment and multi-level marketing have in common is that they so thoroughly saturate the personalities of the people who buy in that “cultist” feels depressingly accurate, making warm and caring friendships daunting if not impossible. When every child is endangered by heavy metals and chemicals according to your worldview, and every new friendship is a business opportunity that your success relies on, of course it’s not a topic you can just peacefully set aside for the greater good like politics at your parents’ Easter brunch. On the other side, you have the vaccinating parents, who know that herd immunity only works if your child’s friends are also immunized, as well as the scores of people who just hate feeling pressured to buy essential oils and marital aids from a person who can’t possibly be an expert on medicine or sexuality. I can’t be friends with someone who could make my children sick, and I can’t be friends with someone who is hoping I’m gullible enough to become a “girlboss” under them and risk going into debt.
Most of all, I can’t be friends with someone who is seeing a “creature” that could destroy me and my family, as well as the cohesion and trust of my community. It might be beautiful, truly beautiful, but it’s also a hell of a dealbreaker.
Published in General
They have actually been saying it for a long time. I just haven’t heard it over the pulpit. It was in 2017. I hope I can continue to reinforce it! :)
Although, my parents successfully ran businesses together and stayed together until Mom died in 2015.
I love this post! In my work out here in California, I always gingerly ask about political leanings, then plough on ahead regardless of what they think, because I can usually bring up an argument that at least makes them doubt themselves. But when I meet someone with a passel of unvaccinated kids, or who offers to help me break out of the rat race by representing a product, I run for the hills.
I’d like to add an anecdote on our increasing autism rates. My sister is a speech pathologist who works with the autism spectrum kids in a large school district. Now, there are no physical criteria for autism: it is diagnosed through behavior.
In her opinion, half her autistic students actually have autism. The other half have been so poorly socialized by negligent or smothering parents that they present classic signs of autism without actually having any medical reason to. Things like not making eye contact when speaking because they’re addicted to their screens, or being grade school age and still speaking in a pastiche of baby talk because that’s the only way the mother talks to them, or as in one particularly bad case, having been abandoned by their parents, raised by a grandmother and uncle in a hotel room with 16 cats, and not being enrolled in school until nine.
It’s not just one writer over at The Federalist. It’s an entire
gagglestable of ’em. This reflects editorial policy, and it would be unfair to blame it on any one single writer.The Federalist has a certain Conservative Mommies Are Awesome angle it wants to push, which is its right. It’s just gonna be off-putting to some conservatives who happen to be mommies, and who happen to be living out their doubts as to why conservative mommies should be all that and a side of truffle fries.
An organ that’s not just pro-life but pro-fecundity has a certain incentive to blow sunshine up mommies’ butts, even though not every mommy can stand to have her butt thus blown.
If vaccination were a significant risk factor for autism, I could understand parents not vaccinating. Saddling a child with an impediment for the rest of his life doesn’t just entail losing some parental bragging rights, but the child’s lifetime of suffering, and in the tradeoff between X chance of death and Y chance of suffering S, it matters what X, Y, and S are.
Parents whose priority is always and everywhere to avoid even slight risks of death to their child do their child no favors. Such children could not play normally (since normal childhood play involves a bit of death-defying now and then), nor could they have major surgery to correct any medical problem immiserating but not killing them (since general anesthesia involves a risk of death).
I’ve risked death in order to restore normal knee function. Not having the knee surgery wouldn’t have killed me, just cramped my style — for the rest of my life. So risking death in a bid for normal functioning seemed worth it. If the risk of lifelong harm from vaccines were as great as the risk of lifelong harm from not repairing a bum knee, then the desire to avoid vaccination would become much more understandable. But it’s not.
The facts of how much harm vaccines prevent versus the harm they risk are what establish the morality of vaccinating, and people who disagree on the facts can’t be blamed for taking that disagreement to its logical conclusion, which is then disagreeing on the morality. People whose disagreement on facts is based in error are culpable for their error, though.
This article was exceptionally good. It was like driving out West, or through the New England countryside in summer, and discovering new, complex scenes at the crest of each hill or round each bend in the road. But all the scenes are connected.
I had to read it once in the evening–missing every connection and allusion–and again in the morning, before I understood it. Normally one can understand all but one or a few sentences in a piece without having to think. In reading this lady’s writing, there is no letup. At the end, my brain felt the way those Border Collies must feel after completing one of those competitive obstacle course races they show on TV.
Like, take your observation about the special problem of being a millennial mom. A completely new insight for me who’s not a mom, woman, or millennial. (“I’ll need to coast through the next few sentences to digest that.”) I must have been subconsciously relieved that it merged into inferences about causation from statistics. (“Whew, at least I can skim over this part–after all, someone who has deep insights into motherhood and womanhood will surely be someone who makes the old familiar errors in scientific reasoning. Oops. It was as if she already knew I’d jump to that prejudiced conclusion, and dashed it politely, without even taking a breath.”)
I can’t remember a time where I loved a post here more. I’m sure it’s happened, I love a lot, but YES OMG YES.
Also, uh, was this like an invitation to be friends? Like, is the subject line serious? Because if you live in the DC area, hit me up girl.
Few things express how different our world is from that of even three generations ago than the fact that today, a child dying is considered so abnormal that we have multi-million dollar charities designed to help dying kids fulfill their dreams.
I’m not knocking the Make-A-Wish Foundation and their clones here; but rather noting just how odd the concept is in human history. Kids dying is so rare and our society is so rich that we can afford to make a big deal about premature death. And we have become so used to childhood death being abnormal instead of normal that we can believe that the chances and consequences of “childhood diseases” are less terrifying than those of being vaccinated.
I am worried as a parent. I am worried about my child dying of a preventable disease. Or being paralyzed by Polio. I am not worried about giving my child a vaccine to prevent these deaths.
The most common drug allergy is Penicillin. You can die of an infection. I would rather risk my child having an allergic reaction to a medication she has never used, then risk her dying from a treatable infection.
Treatments (Vaccines) that save thousands of lives a year and create “herd immunity” to terrible diseases, protecting those who can not take the vaccine, should be mandated by the government.
The autistic spectrum is extremely broad. There are people you can talk with and never know they are on the spectrum, because they work hard to overcome their social handicap. Diagnosis is much more aggressive.
Years ago when my best friend had her first child, I asked her how it was going. She said, “I love him with all my heart. I wouldn’t trade him for the world. But don’t believe them when they tell you having a baby is joy, joy, joy every day. It’s not. It’s awful!”
She felt a bit betrayed by all the new mom (and just mom) hoo-hah. She did go on to have another child, so obviously she didn’t think it was awful every day.
I was reading a book about John Brown a few months ago and a passage struck me on how different things have changed. One of Brown’s sons had moved out to the Kansas/Missouri frontier. He lost a child along the way and he buried it where they were at the time. Some time later, John decided to join his son. On the trip out, John stops and collects the body and brings it with him. So much has changed; a trip like that is now hours in a plane or a day or two by car, as you mentioned a child dying is now abnormal, John was able to exhume a body and put it in the back of his wagon, etc. Reading that passage reminded me that we’ve become soft on some level and take a lot for granted. Also, government is so involved in our lives, that I wonder how many current laws would have been broken by John and his son.
Yeah, DSM 5 in 2013 collapsed a few prior diagnosis into autism spectrum. In 2006 the American Academy of Pediatrics started recommending screening for all children, increasing the rate of diagnosis.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-reasons-autism-rates-are-up-in-the-u-s/
I haven’t seen any of those. Unfortunately, my daughter watched parts of “The Quiet Place,” in her ASL class, and had a panic attack. We don’t do horror here. We’re extra sensitive to it.
@JohnH, you’re not the only one!
@ladylazerus, can we be friends?
Hell no.
It is true that Down’s syndrome and autism don’t have much in common. Down’s Syndrome is genetic condition. Many experts trace Down’s Syndrome to older women having children, as the eggs they have carried in their reproductive systems have aged and undergone changes that make it much more likely than someone over 40 to have a healthy baby.
Autism is not always caused by vaccines, as it is also caused by heavy metal exposure. But to paint the average autistic child as being a high functioning Asperger’s case is misleading. I think everyone who has that viewpoint needs to spend a weekend with a 20 something autistic young adult, who can’t prepare a meal for themselves, except when they grab a stick of butter as a snack. Who can’t handle school work above a kindergartner level. Who maybe will be able to take twenty minutes of their life each morning to put on their own socks and shoes. Who will go on a rampage if denied their wish to play a song over and over at high ear splitting volume. (And by rampage, I mean everything of value will be destroyed in the family room or living room.)
First of all, anecdotal is the way that Big Industries slam anyone who uses inductive reasoning. Prior to the mid 1980’s, the word anecdotal meant “happy and pleasant recounting of an incident.” Once the activists in California were able to put Prop 65 into the legal lexicon of the state’s law, the Pesticide Industry was terrified. After all, they did not want what was happening to Calif to happen in the other 49 states. So they began this campaign to designate any observation that shows anything that is pertinent to the public perception that an item is not safe can be dismissed by the term “anecdotal.”
Ten thousand families put their names on a petition to tell Pres Obama how they brought their perfectly healthy 20 to 27 months old into the pediatricians’, toddlers who were meeting all their developmental markers. Then the toddlers were given their MMR, and then the kids convulsed, began shrieking in pain, had seizures followed by massive diarrhea, & when things got slightly back to more normal, some three months hence, the toddlers were considered to be autistic.
When you consider that Mr Ed Jenner himself only observed some 43 to 48 cow maids before he came up with the idea of vaccination, it is totally suspect that the 10,000 parents of autistic vaccine injured children are dismissed with the judgement “anecdotal” while the legacy of Mr Jenner has proceeded.
Observation and the concept of “risk to benefit” are the most important foundations of science. If we in America had a pharmaceutical & medical industry concerned with health & not profit, those 10,000 people on that petition would have become part of a scientific survey & a serious study to investigate their claims, rather than being dismissed by the “experts.”
However the fact remains that the more heavily impacted autistic humans are increasing in record numbers, as well as those with Asperger’s. This cannot be passed off as misdiagnosis. If that were the case, please explain where these tens of thousands of misdiagnosed and deep into the autistic spectrum adults from the 1950’s through to the 1980’s are hanging out these days?
Doctors themselves recount how in the 1980’s, they barely heard a small mention of autism during med school. All that is changing now.
Then those same doctors began to practice medicine in the mid to late 1980’s, and began to see a few rather minor cases of Asperger’s/autism. But that escalated in the 1990’s, when the vaccination schedule went totally out of whack.
This doctor in the video below has a regimen for his patients that includes vaccination but at a greatly reduced number of vaccines. He does not go by the CDC recommendations. Why? Well for one thing, hepatitis vaccine is one of the most dangerous vaccines out there. Do a search engine on world class statistician Michael Belkin’s work on the statistics surrounding the risk to benefit aspect of this vaccine. The vaccine is all risk and no benefit in terms of normal healthy middle class infants.
The man being interviewed in the following video is not an anti vaccine doctor, However, he knows there are studies showing that over stimulation of the immune system at a young age, or immune activation, can cause auto immune problems. Of course, the CDC experts say that immune activation is not a problem, as there are drugs to take care of the problem. (Drugs that are expensive and that the baby will need to be on for the rest of their life!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjvjf4MnFqc
I’m… not going to, because this series of comments is pretty difficult to follow and also gives the distinct impression that you have sort of a cartoonish and antiquated idea of what autism is and how it presents. I am not going to touch that can of worms with a ten foot pole, much less open it, but I will absolutely emphasize for posterity the point of my post, because this sort of illustrates my point pretty vividly.
You can look at the monster. You can see something terrible and powerful, and call it what it’s not. But no amount of calling it what it’s not is going to make it any less terrible and powerful. The Monster is preventable illnesses. And it can, and has, eaten many children. This is a public health issue. I don’t doubt that you know your sources inside out and have reached to the very recesses of the deepest corners of the internet to find them, but sometimes, just because something is difficult to find doesn’t mean it’s a treasure or a truth.
The moon landing happened, the earth is round, 9/11 was not an inside job, vaccines save lives. I’m inclined to believe scientific consensus on all of these things. The effort it takes to weave a narrative around any conspiracy theory should say a lot about its plausibility.
To get a glimpse of how the anti-vaccine networks operate:
In 2017, a pediatrics practice in Pittsburgh (Kids Plus Pediatrics) posted a video urging parents to get their children vaccinated. Within three weeks, their website was inundated with over 10,000 negative reviews criticizing vaccines.
The practice decided to investigate who was behind the attack and how it was carried out. They worked with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health.
They found that only 8 of the 10,000-plus negative comments were from people in Pennsylvania, the rest were spread across 36 states and 8 countries. The social media attack was directed from inside closed members-only anti-vaccine Facebook groups. A woman in Australia was particularly active, coordinating and directing people to pose as patients and give the practice negative reviews on various social media platforms.
This practice was and is only one of the medical practices that have been attacked in this manner.
I think this is representative of an awful lot of other such ‘outrage’ responses these days, not just limited to the vaxxing subject.
Undoubtably. But this post’s discussion has been about anti-vaxxers and in this particular instance, there was actual research that turned up evidence of the tactics.
Immune overstimulation might trigger autoimmunity. So might immune understimulation, and a whole host of other stuff. Nobody has this figured out yet.
Evolution is a satisficer, not an optimizer, and the chemical communication going on in our bodies involves plenty of cross-talk. (Why should histamine used to regulate immunity, digestion, and alertness? Who ordered this?)
The environment evolution adapted us to regularly — often fatally — assaulted our immune system. The hygiene hypothesis holds our immune systems need a certain amount of assault to have something to do besides attacking our own tissues.
Vaccines are designed to assault our immune systems safely. An unvaccinated child who gets measles also has his immune system assaulted, which also could trigger autoimmunity. Plus the child is at risk of all the other damage measles can cause. Damage that’s considerable, despite being mostly forgotten about these days (because of vaccination). And if an unvaccinated child doesn’t contract those childhood diseases, his immune system has less to do and could attack his body out of “boredom”. Avoiding vaccination offers the worst of both worlds.
Safety doesn’t mean 100% safety. Saying vaccines are safe doesn’t mean no-one, ever, will react adversely to them. The incidence of reported dangerous reactions is very low, though. Even if dangerous reactions were fairly common, though, as long as the risk of danger from vaccination was less than the risk of danger from not vaccinating, vaccination might be worth it.
If you’re interested in promoting inexpensive alternatives to synthetic pharmaceuticals in the treatment of autoimmune diseases, you might be interested in helminth therapy or “poop transplants” (I’m blanking on the fancy name they give the latter.) Both procedures could probably be done by fancied-up patented means rendering them as expensive as other Big Pharma products, but they don’t have to be. Advocating for either procedure seems more likely to help autoimmune Americans than opposing vaccination does.
If vaccines were safe, there would be no need to mandate them. Period.
I am only one person. But already by my mid twenties, I experienced a life altering vaccine reaction, in 1976 following a swine flu vaccine. Luckily the paralysis in my left arm went away on its own in a fifteen month period.
But five years ago, my mother-in-law insisted that she get the flu shot. Within 36 hours of that shot, she was dying. Doctors said there was little hope of her recovering. Fortunately her daughter is an excellent acupuncturist and was able to save her through the herbs and acupuncture treatments that the mainstream med folks make fun of.
So the notion that vaccines only harm one in a million is wrong. Unless myself and my extended family are the unluckiest people in the world.
There’s a story that in the Beijing IBM headquarters, there’s a sign that says “If you’re one in a million, there are 1400 people just like you in China.”
Yeah, some people just have rotten luck. And it’s entirely possible that it’s not random, that there’s something abnormal in your genes that causes bad reactions to vaccines.
I was adopted, so there is nothing in my genes that would have anything to do with this. Especially given that even if not adopted, my mom-in-law would not be sharing any genes. Spouse’s side of the family is Jewish descent; I am of Irish and Scandinavian.
What this does have to do with this is the fact that the CDC that regulates the vaccines in this country is totally a revolving door to the industry that they supposedly regulate.
Hence the public realized the impact of the early vaccine against the roto virus when that vaccine took the lives of 105 babies, all because not much in the way of studies were involved. Vaccine was released pre-maturely; over 105 families lost their infants.
I fully understand the brain washing that the idea of “those who believe implicitly in vaccination are better educated; they are more often than not professionals; smarter, better Lah Di Dah,” achieves, first hand. I was injured first in 1976, and wanting to keep that special status my internal virtue signalling provided, I went on to fully support vaccines until the late 1990’s.