Counterproductive

This is a rant by a friend of mine, copied from Facebook with permission.

"TFW medical racism, medical sexism, and medical ableism are your long-time special interests, and you see all of this conspiracy around vaccines being the cause of autism, altering your DNA, and now thousands of privileged babies marching in Montreal causing a vaccination clinic to close preemptively on Saturday.

Because besides making things worse RIGHT NOW, you are holding up actually useful research and findings about the subjects you claim concern you.

You are holding up justice and medical equity when you:

Cite real experiments like the Tuskegee Experiment in THE WRONG CONTEXT. Clearly you don’t understand how this horrific experiment was conducted, if you cite it as reason for Black people to not be vaccinated. You perpetuate misinformation, and erase the actual mistreatment Black people suffered.

When you say that vaccines cause autism. This was debunked YEARS AGO. REPEATEDLY. This is currently the go-to in the largest grift related to vaccine misinformation. Scaring parents into “curing” autism, increasing snake oil salesmen’s monetized social media platforms, completely changing the narrative around autism... redirecting huge amounts of research dollars to disprove what we already know, still changing the focus to “why are these people broken” in a lot of research instead of what autistics would like to be researched about themselves.

When you spew all of this unfounded, imaginary bull&^%, I don’t get to learn more about what is REALLY HAPPENING. You don’t need conspiracies if you really want to help make people accountable for science and to encourage people who science well. Good science needs people who have good science literacy, are willing to ask good questions, and follow up on them. Also, people to admit when they don’t know as much as they think they do, to be quiet and find out more until they do.

There are a ton of resources about the science of vaccines and medication, and lots of valid questions about how trials have been carried out in the past, and people still have safety and efficacy concerns. All of this is cockblocked by the crowd who thinks vaccines are part of a world plot.

Because beyond the illogic, you feel the rest of the world is unsafe, but at the moment you are making the world less so. We should still contour research good and bad effects of the vaccine. The first Quebec/Canadian death related to the vaccine occurred in April. This is a low number but it is still important. This was a real person, whose life touched others. While still less risky than other medications that cause blood clots, it’s a concern. Funnily enough, the same people who will point to this, downplay the number of deaths due to Covid constantly. I mean...

Stop it. With your misinformation and lack of logic and super-spreader events, you are going to make other people sick, and you’re also making my friends cry, who have lost people and have family sick right now.

I have a hard time forgiving you for that."