Whoops, You Fell Down the Idiot Hole*

You may not remember, but a couple of years ago a mom made the news because all 7 of her kids got whooping cough. She, of course, was against vaccines. Her children infected her baby niece, who wasn't yet fully vaccinated. It was terrible for all of them, and now this mom is pro-vaccine.

I hate this whole story.

Really.

Even the part where she learns a valuable lesson and evolves on the issue.

I know I'm supposed to applaud her evolution, which she blogged about extensively.

But I'd rather use my hands to slap her.

Imagine, instead, if this woman refused to use car seats because she grew up just fine without them. And then, she got rear-ended in traffic and all of her children were injured because they weren't in car seats. And then she ran around promoting car seats. Still impressed?

How about if she let her kids smoke because she had a grandma who smoked like a chimney and lived to be 90?

How about if she claimed that racism didn't exist because no one in her (white) family had experienced it or perpetuated it?

Ok, I'm exaggerating. About this particular woman, anyway. Although I always wonder about the anti-vaccination parents who use car seats. Why do they believe the car seat studies and not the vaccination studies? Car seat companies operate for profit, just like pharmaceutical companies, after all. And I'm probably jinxing myself here, but we've gotten sick way more often than we've gotten in car accidents. And the fight to buckle Hugmonkey into his car seat back in the day was a daily thing, unlike getting vaccinations or even getting sick. How odd then that there's no anti-car seat movement. (At least, not one I can find with a quick Google search)

But this is not meant to be a post about vaccines**, exactly. It's meant to be about people who cannot properly evaluate information unless it happens to them. The whooping cough mom admits to dismissing peer reviewed scientific studies in favor of "natural" mom blogs to justify her anti-vax stance. But then those evil medical experts saved her children's lives so now she believes what they've been saying to her for years. Seriously?

That's like taking my advice on time management  over some expert's, then being saved from financial ruin by the expert hiring you. But you never would have teetered near financial ruin if you had just listened to the expert in the first place.

In other words, random people on the internet do not know more than the CDC, or the Mayo Clinic, or even public health reporters at the Boston Globe. Believing the people on your favorite forum over experts at the American Academy of Pediatrics puts you in the same idiot hole as people who believe The National Enquirer over the The Philadelphia Inquirer.

*Yes, this post could have been titled, "Fuck You, Whooping Cough Mom". I predict that most of my posts in the near(ish) future could be titled, "Fuck You, so and so" and be perfectly apt. But finding creative ways to say "fuck you" is going to become my new favorite hobby.

**If you want to argue with me about vaccines, read this first. And then just don't. I'm not going to change my mind.