chemicals, the anti-vaccinationist menace

Here’s a fact that many, many modern anti-vaccination activists are realizing in droves. The world is filled with chemicals and yes, some of them in the right concentration and at the right frequency are toxic. And according to their fevered logic, because there are chemicals in everything and these chemicals can be toxic, they must be evil, released by malicious, profit-minded monsters who don’t care if you die to make a buck. All the fear- mongering sites they construct and promote under the calls of saving lives from Big Pharma and Big Borther quote mercury, formaldehyde, aluminum, and whatever else makes them or their followers shudder in fright along with the kinds of statistics which show utter and absolute ignorance of how units of measurement and human bodies actually work.

God forbid you vaccinate your children, they cry in terror, you may as well inject a vial of toxic waste directly into their veins! To all who’d ascribe to this school of thought, I have a suggestion. If you are terrified of being exposed to anything that can be toxic, just go ahead and check into your nearest and most convenient cemetery right now because the world is always full of potentially dangerous chemicals.

Actually, believe it or not, plain old water can kill you if you drink it too fast. Put enough in your system over very short periods of time and you’ll disturb crucial chemical reactions in your body. Can’t be, right? It’s water! How could one ever possibly claim that water ever killed someone? Well, there was a highly publicized case of an idiotic radio station contest in which contestants had to drink far too much water and the winner died. If we go by anti-vaccination logic, we should swear off anything containing water because people died from drinking it too quickly. But yet, anti-vaccinationists drink plenty of water, thousands of gallons of it over decades and they are still alive. Funny enough, their bodies are also producing formaldehyde, contain uranium, and come into contact with deadly salt, potassium, and carbon dioxide.

In fact, the more paranoid devotees of alt med make a hobby of finding out out every single chemical their bodies contain to know what detox remedies to buy, and then are just as surprised to find that their bodies still contain all the evil chemicals they wanted so badly to flush out. And they will continue to have all sorts of potentially nasty chemicals in their bodies for their entire lives, virtually all of them in such a tiny dose that they don’t even matter. Parts per billion or per million in a very large human body which evolved to deal with many of these chemicals are just not a real threat.

Now it’s true that there are dangerous forms of pollution out there from which we do need to protect ourselves because they emit far too many toxic chemicals on a constant basis, but vaccines are not one of them. We are not giving too many of them too soon, and all the trace chemicals so eagerly cited by anti-vaccination activist websites are quickly flushed out of our system. Have you noticed that their appeals to mercury in vaccines will never mention what type of mercury they mean? Have you ever wondered why?

Because methyl mercury is a pollutant which tends to stick around and has the nasty habit of causing permanent neurological damage, as ancient cultures trying to use it as an immortality serum found out firsthand, but ethyl mercury, the type that is actually used in trace amounts for one or two vaccines, is flushed out of the body in less than a week. To say that ethyl mercury will kill you from toxic buildup would be a lie, and so would saying that vaccines use methyl mercury. But noting that the type of mercury used in one type of vaccines administered once a year is flushed out of the body in under a week would undermine their vaccines-have-evil-toxins-that-will-kill-you argument so the anti-vaccionationists will just say “mercury” to keep their propaganda superficially believable.

To simply assume that because something can be a poison at very high concentrations is a poison, is simply irrational and casts the entire universe as one, big, poisonous stew, our bodies included. Then again, it’s not surprising that the same people whose every utterance about vaccines is either wrong or totally devoid of any facts or logic would come up with this line of debate. Really, you would be better off consulting the Magic Eight Ball for vaccine advice than those who hinged their very existence on wars with medical experts, and who weave elaborate tales of propaganda and random accusations of conspiracies of medical evil when the simple question of which vaccines they think are safe or how they should be modified comes up.

At least that Magic Eight Ball would leave vaccination against diseases which can have life-long complications that could easily shorten your lifespan as an available option and it won’t try to argue with you that polio wasn’t really that big of a deal (just ignore the iron lungs in the museums) or that smallpox, one of the greatest killers of human populations in all of recorded history, was going to go away on its own if we all washed our hands a tad more, nevermind the fact that smallpox was a virus, not a bacterium one could just wash away…