EMother: I'm having serious doubts about getting the baby vaccinated.
RP: What? That's dumb. Vaccinate your fuckin' kid.
EFather: But have you heard about these studies that said mercury in them causes autism?
RP: Fuck that. One bullshit study. Have you heard of small pox lately? No? Vaccinate your fuckin' kid.
EM: I'm not sure.
RP: Did you get all your shots?
EF and EM: Yes.
RP: Did you have a choice?
EF: No.
RP: Vaccinate your fuckin' kid. Or start a colony of people who don't vaccinate and stay the fuck away from everyone else's kids.
EM: You don't have to be an asshole about it. We're just discussing it.
RP: And that's the problem.
Refusing to get your children immunized against measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, whooping cough, hepatitis, diphtheria, fuckin' polio, and other nasty shit is one of the great expressions of bourgeois decadence in the latter days of this dying empire. It is a ludicrous convergence of voodoo-like pseudoscience, worship of individuality, and selfish helicopter parenting. You do not get to have an "opinion" on vaccinations because your failure to act has an effect on everyone else. The science on vaccines is so overwhelmingly in favor of making sure your kids get them that, qualitatively, there is no difference between the anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists.
This is where we stand right now, in 2015:
- The CDC is worried about a large-scale measles outbreak in the United States. In 2000, measles had been thought eradicated from the country. In 2008, there was an outbreak. And now? Over 100 cases. (And, by the way, measles is actually not a disease to be fucked with. It's way worse than some red dots on a cartoon cat's face.)
- 21% of 18-29 year-old Americans think that vaccines might or does cause autism, proving that all those education budget cuts across the country have worked as intended in stupiding people.
- America's angriest deflated ball, Chris Christie, had to walk back comments where he suggested that it was cool if parents didn't inoculate their kids. Meanwhile, President Obama said, more or less, "Vaccinate your fucking kids."
- And we get the parade of pathetic parents, smugly justifying their "choice" not to get their children immunized, like the California mom who "meditated on it a lot" before deciding to forgo shots for her son. When the daughter of another parent said she'd just get the measles shot rather than be forced to stay home from high school during this outbreak, her delusional mother said, "I’d rather you miss an entire semester than you get the shot."
- Or the Arizona father who said, "It's not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [another child] to be supposedly healthy." Because he wasn't enough of a bastard, he added about a child going through chemotherapy who was susceptible to preventable diseases, "As far as I'm concerned, it's very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place." And then, because if you're gonna be a motherfucker, you may as well fuck all the mothers, he said, "It's not my responsibility to be protecting their child." Finally, as if he decided that he was going to be just an irredeemable cunt about everything, he remarked, "It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child." Remember: the "risk" is getting a few shots that almost everyone gets.
Swear to fuck, if any of these parents who don't vaccinate their kids utter the phrase, "It takes a village," they should be sent to real fuckin' villages, like in areas of Africa. These are places on earth where parents are begging for shots to keep preventable diseases from killing or seriously harming their children.
Those are people lined up in the sun and dirt last year during a war in the Central African Republic so the World Health Organization could immunize their children from measles. The WHO inoculated over 110,000 children in just one month. Those parents didn't give a fuck about a discredited Lancet study or piles of utter bullshit posted on Facebook. They didn't fuckin' meditate on it while worrying about gluten and GMOs. They only knew that their kids have a better chance of staying alive if they get their shots.
You either live in this society or you create one of your own. It's something people on the left and right forget all the time: Your stupidity, your ignorance, your fear is not just your own when others have to suffer for it. Societies are supposed to have unspoken agreements among the people living there. We live in a country where the air is poisoned, the land is fracked to shit, and the water is one chemical spill away from undrinkable. And you think you're protecting your kids by not giving them the one thing that we know for sure works to protect them? It'd be laughable if you weren't fucking with the lives of everyone else.
(Note: The Rude Pundit is still friends with the parents up top, and he loves the hell out of their vaccinated kids.)
(Note 2: Don't send the Rude Pundit all your fuckin' links to all your bullshit websites that prove whatever ignorant point you want to make about the "dangers" of vaccines.)
(Note 3: Yeah, the Rude Pundit knows lots of kids on the autism spectrum. None of their parents blame the shots.)
(Note 4: Yeah, vaccinations should be mandatory for your kid to go to school, with only medical exceptions that doctors certify for reasons like cancer treatment.)
