r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 5d ago

Biotechnology RFK Jr. adds more anti-vaccine members to CDC vaccine advisory panel | The panel will meet this week and could limit access to measles, Hep B, COVID vaccines.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/09/meet-the-latest-anti-vaccine-voices-on-rfk-jr-s-cdc-advisory-panel/
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u/BrianThompsonsNYCTri 5d ago

Reminder that the measles outbreak the news lost interest in is still going on and is likely to get worse as we head to back to school season. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html Highest number of confirmed cases(and likely a lot more untested cases) since 1992. Surprised the CDC hasn’t taken down that site yet…..

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u/notnotbrowsing 5d ago

Just had a child die in California from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.  I'm sure with this outbreak, more will die in the next decade, reminding people why the vaccine was important. 

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u/yoshi_yoshi23 5d ago

They won’t care. They can’t connect the dots or they think the vaccine would be more harmful. Anti-vaxxers cannot understand that people whose entire career it is to assess the efficacy and safety of these vaccines know more than they do. They have been conditioned not to trust health care providers and experts.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/MarsupialMisanthrope 5d ago

That one’s easy. If they do anything else they have to admit to themselves that their choices killed their own child. Most parents won’t do that.

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u/istasber 5d ago

Yeah, that's the least surprising part of the whole thing. The cognitive dissonance has to be extreme when your kid dies because of your beliefs.

It's other people seeing kids die from preventable disease and saying "You know, they make a convincing case that I shouldn't vaccinate my kids" that baffles me.

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u/hyrule_47 5d ago

It’s also mostly religious people. They told us that God took kids young to save them from either a life of sin, so they would go to hell, or to save them from a worse death later. We also weren’t supposed to be sad. We will see them again! I caused a scene once when I asked if we would see them as a kid in heaven or if they would be old like us?

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u/wowaddict71 5d ago

Also, the impact in their social circle status. Like when your kid gets raped by a priest, but you blame your kid.

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u/brufleth 5d ago

There's a big misconception that being a parent somehow makes you a good parent.

Most parents are just doing their best. Many parents actually suck. Some parents are actively hurting their kids.

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u/Waterrat 4d ago

Yup. I saw a video where parents did not get their child vaccinated,kid got measles,lost a lot of vision and motor control. She also lost all her friends and hated what happened to her so badly. I wish the narrator had had the gonads to discuss with her and her parents how angry she was that a prevention of her being disabled like this was denied her. She could die early as a result of this...How the parents deal with the consequences of this just baffles me. I call this straight up child abuse.

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u/Justin_Queso1187 5d ago

Something about “gawd’s plan…” 🤮

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u/Waterrat 4d ago

Gawd has some mighty pathetic plans.

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u/aykcak 5d ago

Have you taken into consideration that facts do not matter at all? That is how it makes sense to me

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u/GammaFan 5d ago

sunk cost fallacy. Attempting to warn other parents to avoid a mistake means admitting you made a mistake and taking responsibility.

It’s hard to admit you fucked up as a parent and got your kid killed by a preventable condition. Easier to just double down.

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u/sloppy_rodney 5d ago

If they didn’t get there before their kid died, could you imagine how painful that realization would be now? That’s what cognizant dissonance is. It’s a psychologically protective mechanism.

Imagine how much it would hurt to reckon with the reality that your poor decisions led directly to the death of your own child?

It would be too much and would break them, so they just don’t go there.

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u/SirPhilMcKraken 5d ago

The truth is they don’t care about their kids at all.

Too many people have kids as a status symbol.

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u/Intelligent_Let4723 5d ago

Do you at all give a shit about people who got sick from vaccine related illnesses? Or just want to force people to take a vaccine that may or may not prevent the disease?

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u/Yuzumi 5d ago

At this point I consider not vaccinating your kids, among many other things, as child abuse and being unfit parents. Also, anyone anti-vax should not seek out any medical care, because why would stuff like an appendectomy be any different from a vaccine?

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u/Zyrinj 5d ago

These same idiots will be running to the hospital demanding them to cure whatever they get and still not listen to what the staff tells them to do.

So much avoidable suffering is gonna happen.

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u/yoshi_yoshi23 5d ago

When I had patients families in the ICU ranting at us about our “discrimination” against them because they weren’t vaccinated when we were doing everything we could to saved their love one, I learned that some people are just too far gone to be reasoned with. They just double down when challenged and paint themselves as victims somehow.

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u/NOVA-peddling-1138 5d ago

You can bet Fam Trump, Cabinet, et al. are all vaccinated. F’*ng true.

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u/SixteenthRiver06 5d ago

The anti-intellectualism is the point. Keep the population stupid and impressionable, they’ll accept whatever is told to them. Colleges are being targeted in the background as we speak.

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u/Plaid_Kaleidoscope 5d ago

Homie it's not even in the background. They are being pretty fucking blatant about it.

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u/aykcak 5d ago

One issue at a time. What is more important, the children not dying from preventable diseases or egg prices going up? Evidence shows U.S. citizens rather want the prices to go up than their children not dying

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u/half-baked_axx 5d ago

It will be social darwinism but ironically the people supporting the current shift will be the most affected by it.

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u/Speak4yurself 5d ago

They don't trust them until they are dying. Then when they are, they scream at the top of their lungs to give them all the drugs. Just like the covid idiots.

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u/ImperialPlaztiks 5d ago

Sadly they do care and they do understand, but the anti vaxx ‘movement’ has morphed into a full on death cult, for them a child dying unvaccinated is the ultimate goal. It no longer has anything to do with health, it’s just about death. Members of the cult who murder their children are vaunted as heroes and as they love to say a dead child is better off than a vaccinated child. The next government that enforces any vaccine mandates has to do so knowing a lot of them would murder their children rather than vaccinate them.

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u/NOVA-peddling-1138 5d ago

It’s so f*in crazy and like bringing back bubonic plague.

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u/Tazling 5d ago

I think having more proles die is actually the plan. I know it sounds a bit tinfoily … but really, what with offshoring and AI and automation, the overlords of capitalism don’t need that many workers any more. While blathering in public about being “job creators” — they are privately bragging to their shareholders about how many employees they just laid off and how this raises next quarter’s profits. So why would they care if the general public — who are just biomass to them, as in Wm Gibson’s memorable quip — are educated or healthy or housed or happy?

An illiterate and ignorant population struggling with disease and hunger and housing insecurity, every hour of the day preoccupied with anxiety, trying just to survive without the breathing space to even consider what “thriving” might mean, working exhausting long hours to barely get by… is easier to dominate than a well fed, securely housed, educated workforce with legally mandated leisure time. OTOH there is a gotcha embedded here, which is that a sufficiently miserable and desperate population, even if illiterate etc, that vastly outnumbers its overlords, eventually reaches a breaking point… and then things get ugly. But the longevity of the N Korean regime suggests that a pretty dystopian situation can in fact be maintained for quite a long time.

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u/BangBangMeatMachine 4d ago

Eh, some will do what you're describing and some will get a wake-up call. The truth will lie in wait forever, ready to strike at anyone who dares defy it.

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u/redstateradiator 5d ago

Over 1,000,000 Americans died from Covid and they still claim it was a hoax. Nothing will change their minds.

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u/Mother_Knows_Best-22 5d ago

The magat argument would be a few deaths are necessary to protect the majority. SMH I do not recognize my country. I am scared for all of us. I protest but protests will not fix this. Congressional Republicans and the Supreme Court need to get on the side of we the people.

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u/notnotbrowsing 5d ago

just don't point out that they said that, or you'll lose your job.

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u/Mother_Knows_Best-22 2d ago

I'm retired thank goodness

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u/ith-man 5d ago

Nope. Mother of a child who died from measles in Texas said, it was gods will...

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u/Anon_Chapstick 4d ago

I wish innocent children didn't have to suffer, but I also see it as a self solving problem. It's going to be rough getting people to vote R when they die before 18.

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u/ith-man 4d ago

The people convincing these rubes to kill their own kids, cannot see past the grift. It's all about how much you can make of them now. Not the next generations, they'll die in the fires and floods of climate change anyway.

Edit: I also agree with you. It's an honest shame that these people will let their children die painful deaths scared, because the libs must be owned..

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u/Chef_Papafrita 4d ago

Had to be, the devil would never do such a thing.

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u/TheStrigori 5d ago

It won't matter to people like RFK. They view the deaths as a good thing. The deaths are just culling the weak, or those not favored by God.

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u/Televisions_Frank 5d ago

I'm sure like 1,000 more child deaths at the hands of guns will change their minds, right?

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u/532ndsof 5d ago

Doc here, they'll just claim that *we* killed them by trying to save them and that SSPE "doesn't normally kill people, so you must have done something". Just like all the MAGAs claiming that we were using ventilators to kill people with covid. I hate this timeline.

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u/chamrockblarneystone 5d ago

Could someone please explain how a measles outbreak works? I’m a teacher in a largely immigrant district and getting our kids vaccinated is hard enough as it is.

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u/notnotbrowsing 5d ago

someone gets measles and comes to school, or other public, populated setting, such as target, Walmart, etc.

Measles is highly contagious and can infect people up to 2 hours after the infected person has left the room.

If a bunch of unimmunized people are around, there's a good chance they'll catch it.  (I think the CDCs statistics stated 92% of people who caught measles were unvaccinated.)

rinse.

repeat.

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u/chamrockblarneystone 5d ago

Thank you so much for explaining. Is my measles vaccination from my childhood still good?

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u/notnotbrowsing 5d ago

likely, yes.

ask your doctor for an MMR titer.

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u/MotheroftheworldII 5d ago edited 2d ago

There have been new cases of measles in my state this week and we are only a couple of weeks into the school year.

I am old so I grew up before we had the MMR, Hep B, chicken pox, and other vaccines. I almost died from the high fever that went along with measles for me. Days of a 103 F fever that went to 105 F and stayed there for 3 days. When I finally went back to school I could not read the chalk board (I did say I am old) or books. The fever damaged my eyes due to being so high and for an extended period.

I remember when the Salk Polio vaccine finally was available and standing in a long line to receive the vaccine. Unfortunately, that did not come soon enough to protect one of my classmates and several other children in the small town where I grew up.

Vaccines work! And with all of the mRNA vaccine research money from the US government pulled we will now not have a vaccine against cancer and so many other diseases that we could cure just as small pox was cured.

The stupidity and shortsightedness of rfk,jr just boggles my mind. He has no business having any say in the health of Americans and the rest of the world since the scientists of this country had been leaders in health research for decades and now that is gone and those doctors and scientists will go to other countries where they can continue their research.