Too long to copy and paste, but trust me, you guys will love this one...

http://blacklistednews.com/news-5065-0-5-5--.html

One way to combat the truths behind a conspiracy theory is to add totally insane shit to the story, until it begins to sound completely ridiculous.

Not really. Kids are required to get certain vaccinations when they are born, etc. You want to opt out of this? Is this the issue? Or do you think they are going to start injecting you with some kind of mind control serum? What kind of 'forced vaccinations' are you anticipating?

I have always been paranoid about vaccinations. I have no other theories or alien conspiracies or ANYTHING else. My only thing is vaccines.

The government will NEVER touch me with a needle. Never.

I understand stickyfingerz feeling and desire to assert his freedom as an American citizen. As a general rule, I'm not for allowing anybody to force me to put chemicals in my body if I don't believe there is good reason.

I don't know all of the circumstances behind the appearance of this particular flu bug that has newly surfaced and is making the rounds. The biggest problem people face with this is the credibility issue. We feel manipulated by the auto industry, the petroleum industry, the banking industry and now conveniently we have a new flu and several pharmaceutical companies that certainly stand to make large profits from vaccinations and medications used to treat it.

Added to that is the fact that polio and smallpox were around for years, allowing vaccines to be researched and tested over a broad period of time. This flu just got here thus any vaccine will be developed and administered quickly, leaving doubt in people's minds about safety and side effects.

The problem is that we cannot be certain that this will be as serious in nature as previous pandemic flu's have been.

What's amazing is people's irrational fear of injections, disregard for public health, and apathy about getting seriously ill. So I'm a sheep for living in a city, using the internet, using a toilet, washing with soap, driving a car, all these things most people do they must be sheep.

Put yourself in the governments position. You can
a/ give people the right to refuse medication and diseases will sweep the city, millions will die
b/ make vaccinations for everyone, the best way to wipe out disease

Who in their right mind would want to live in disease? Like hundreds of years ago with people pulling carts yelling "Bring out yer dead!". Because we'd still be living like that if it wasn't for vaccines.

Quite the opposite, actually.

Few physicians support prescriptions for "every ache and issue". Overprescription is generally seen as a very bad thing - especially in the case of antibiotics, where it has become an actual danger to public health by creating resistant strains of bacteria.

With SSRIs specifically, there is the problem that a patient who believes he needs a specific drug (because of drug advertising or word of mouth) may overstate or (unintentionally) misrepresent symptoms. It's a problem that is exacerbated by people googling specific disorders, since people may think "yeah, I might have this" when reading about symptoms of those disorders, even if they didn't consider the "symptoms" they have to be a problem beforehand.

That creates some major diagnostical problems, since with mood and personality disorders, what the patient tells forms the basis for the diagnosis. And if the patient has already focused on what he (unconsciously) considers to be "relevant" and "important", it distorts the diagnostic process. Personally, I think it quite likely that merely reading the Wikipedia entry for "major depressive disorder" by a patient increases chances of a diagnosis of major depressive disorder in that patient by a significant margin.

Perhaps an even better example would be Oprah. Have Oprah do an item on a disorder with somewhat vague symptoms and an extremely low rate of occurrence, and you'll inevitably see many thousands of people visiting their GP with symptoms exactly matching that disorder. (it would make for an interesting experiment: have Oprah do an item on a non-existent disorder, maybe with certain mutually exclusive symptoms, and see how many people come to their GP thinking they have it)

Chances of this flu being as serious as some of the worst previous ones are pretty low.

But if it does follow the pattern of, say, the 1918 Spanish flu, then it could easily kill half a billion people. And while this probably isn't "the one", it's all but certain that a pandemic like that will happen again. The problem is that by the time you're certain, it will already be too late.

Call me cynical, but I don't think the anti-vaccination crowd will say "we made our choice, now we have to deal with it" when that happens :2 cents:

(for the record, though: this thread was actually more about the anti-vaccination crowd in general, specifically the people who oppose the MMR and HPV vaccines)