Vaccines of any kind aren’t 100% effective or last forever (hence boosters for many). But if your vaccination is up to date and you catch whatever bug it is anyway, the vaccine will almost always still reduce the severity of the illness *and* mitigate your infectiousness towards others...

And by “authority” I mean experts, with authoritative knowledge and expertise... I just reread my comment and realized it looked a bit like I was on the side of “dear leader” types ;)

While this is true, there has never been a Golden Age where science and rationality ruled and people never messed up. People have always been fearful, skittish, and ready to trust anybody or thing that hit their dopamine center over actual proof. Hell, science is as vulnerable to fads, junk reasoning and trendiness as…

Yup, it's a case of a little bit of education coupled with a complete lack of real critical thinking skills leading people to think they're smart enough to question authority - like all the world's anti-vaxxers are 16 yr olds with a learner's permit who think that now they're ready for the Grand Prix...

My cousin died of that. Most likely because of measles. I wasn’t vaccinated at all as a child but my son is for sure vaccinated, considering my second hand experience of how not vaccinating can be a disaster :(

And a desire to not watch them needlessly suffer from something preventable. My bff caught measles as a child and still has scars on her lungs from developing pneumonia.

The thing to remember is most of the time stupid isn’t the person’s fault. Mostly I blame the American education system, lack of funding and decades of standardised testing have sucked the critical thinking out of a lot of the American public. You guys need education reform STAT. Also some people are just born that…

I admit I’m just a crazy dreamer. 

Exactly. This "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" mindset is ignorant on so many levels, and also not how disease works! 

I’ll chime in... Though I had my MMR vax on schedule as a child, I was part of the 2005 mumps outbreak in Halifax. Yay.

I had the childhood whooping cough vaccination. Had whooping cough a few years ago.

*Raises hand* Apparently when I was vaccinated, I got a weak batch or something (this was decades ago; hopefully the quality control is better now), because I ended up getting the measles a couple years later.

Pretty much any vaccine has a small percentage of people for whom it doesn’t work. (I’ve had the MMR and a rubella booster and yet I’m still not immune to rubella.) Which is why it steams me when people say, “If you’re vaccinated, why do you care if other people aren’t?” Because of the people who the vaccine doesn’t…

Another example of why herd immunity is so important!

And measles can lead to encephalitis. You only have to Google to see that even in 2018, encephalitis often leads to death or to terrible, permanent disability (including the loss of the person’s extremities). It’s not just a matter of “well, if I get it, they’ll give me a course of antibiotics and send me home.”

I was confused as to how a vaccinated person got measles, but apparently 3% do:

Optimist

The sad part is some anti-vaxxers believe that if their kids get one of these illnesses, they can be cured because medicine is more advanced than it was 50-100 years ago.  Failing to realize the reason these diseases are so rare is because the vaccines are the cure.  

My biggest wish for 2019 is that people, worldwide, stop being so fucking stupid. Not just about vaccinations, but about everything. In lieu of that, I wish that only the stupid people would be harmed by their stupidity instead of all of us suffering along with them. 

Science will always be true even if you don’t believe it. Thanks modern medical science for keeping me alive with medicine and vaccines! And fuck off to the morons who believe one discredited paper from someone whose licence was stripped over a huge body of scientific evidence.