In a tweet about vaccinations, Darla Shine, wife of recently-resigned Donald Trump communications director, Bill Shine, said this:

“Bring back our “#ChildhoodDiseases”.

Shine’s love for Trump is already evidence of her poor judgement. Her anti-vaccination stance proves her idiocy.

All over the globe, people are choosing not to vaccinate their children, based largely on the inaccurate and conspiracy-driven information they get from social media.

The Daily Beast reports that in America, in reaction to the recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, several states have taken action to close the loopholes that allow parents with religious or philosophical objections to vaccines to enrol their children in school.

Experts say the anti-vaccine or vaccine choice groups, as they commonly refer to themselves, are becoming larger, better organized and funded in part because their prolific use of social media, as well as the rise of a group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. which has helped to coordinate their efforts to push back on new laws.

“Social media has given it a national presence. It’s no longer just a collection of different states, it’s now gone across the country,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician. “Right now you might call it a media empire—you have almost 500 anti-vaccine websites.”

And it’s not just America. The anti-vaxxer movement is spreading across the globe, and even South Africa isn’t immune. Here’s The Daily Maverick:

Three measles outbreaks in South Africa in 2017 raised red flags about the extent of the impact of local vaccine hesitancy. That year, measles cases increased 12-fold compared with 2016 due to three localised outbreaks largely in unvaccinated communities, according to the National Institute of Communicable Diseases.

But the death toll remains elusive, as does the true state of South Africa’s immunisation programme, because the statistics simply don’t exist.

The estimated percentage of children vaccinated in South Africa at the start of 2019 was roughly 70%, and the number could get lower as parents buy into the internet hype.

Here are the facts:

South Africa has 12 routine vaccines in its public immunisation schedule. Two of these vaccines, introduced for children in 2009, save about 5,000 lives locally every year. The country was the first in Africa to introduce these immunisations — one to protect against diarrhoeal diseases and the other for pneumonia prevention.

Since these immunisations, dedicated hospital wards for childhood diarrhoea have all but vanished in South Africa, according to Madhi. But he warned that if South Africa is complacent on vaccines “we will face the same trajectory of measles outbreaks seen in the US”.

So resist the urge to believe the crap that you read on social media. Because every time you believe the folks telling you that vaccines are a scam by Big Pharma to take your cash, you’re inadvertently supporting another industry set to grow if we don’t start vaccinating our children:

The market for teeny tiny coffins.

[sources:dailybeast&dailymaverick]