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Anti-vaxxers target Texas measles doctors to cast doubt on deaths amid outbreak (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 17 hours ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.

Yet some anti-vaccine activists soon began claiming that the girl died from medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a playbook that they are now running in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak – a message taken up by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly disputes the rising death toll.

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[–] 25 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

On Facebook, a woman asked about local doctors that will see her unvaxed child. I asked her, "serious question, if you’re not going to follow doctor’s advice, why are you going? Are you just looking for someone who will tell you what you want to hear? Because any reputable doctor is going to recommend that you get your child vaccinated."

It was an actual, serious question, but not only did I not get a response, I of course got attacked by nuts justifying the behavior and calling me names.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago

    You should send her Roald Dahl's letter. Or tell her to pass it on to her child, since that is who he directed it at.

    The death of his daughter is absolutely heartbreaking. Before a vaccine was available. The monsters and assholes that think it's cute and clever and "because mah immune system" and other bullshit become all the more insufferably stupid when you read something like this:

    As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything. "Are you feeling all right?", I asked her. "I feel all sleepy", she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. … I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered.

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  • [–] 13 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

    Right? If you dont trust doctors then why go to one at all? Why call 911 if you don't trust the doctors at the hospital?? A lot of this stuff happened around covid too.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    There were and are so many fucking idiots that insisted it was all a plot to hurt their special little failson tiny-d donnie. Seriously, how fucking stupid do you have to believe that a pandemic is all about just the United States and donnie?

    They'd say it was "just like the flu", that people were dying "with" Covid, not "from" Covid. And then were pushing stupid nostrums like Ivermectin, HCQ, etc., instead of getting the vaccine.

    And they refused to do even the most basic of protocols to make anything better. Insisted on doing shit in person. Demanded that churches and business and schools should be open. That protecting anyone at risk was not worth one iota of sacrifice. Kept on insisting it was only the fat and the old that were affected (like the fat and the old deserve to die, I guess? This is from the pro-life types, too, of course, LOL)

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    They'd say it was "just like the flu", that people were dying "with" Covid, not "from" Covid.

    Now they're trotting this lie out about measles.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    Yep. And measles is wildly contagious and can not only kill young and perfectly healthy children (no shaming the fat and the old or blaming it on not lifting enough or whatever the fuck), but even those that survive can have some wildly terrible consequences immediately after and later in life.

    These people are terribly dangerous. I'm sure we had a lot of excess death thanks to them during Covid, and we sure as fuck are having excess death from them for this.

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