Beagle’s Plea For Reason

Beagle’s Plea For Reason

It barely needs stating, but I will say it anyway. The person that chooses not to vaccinate their child is a selfish, narcissistic creature with no regard for others. They don’t care if their child falls ill because they are convinced that a potentially devastating disease is somehow better than the minimal risks associated with vaccines. They don’t care if your child falls ill. They don’t care that children with valid health reasons for not being vaccinated depend on herd immunity to survive. Instead, they cling to debunked and misleading “studies” to justify their dangerous and ridiculous decision. They make up insane conspiracies about the government attempting to control people through vaccines. They are irrational, arrogant enough to believe that they know better than actual doctors. They will even claim that God protects their children and yours from illness. I’m not kidding. I saw that on my newsfeed only a few weeks ago.  
The people I have described are already beyond the pale, but I recently came across some next level madness from a group previously unknown to me called Vaccine Resistance Movement.
I will not link to them. I even debated mentioning them by name because they don’t deserve free publicity.
In November of last year, a much needed immunization drive was halted when Muslim extremists murdered four vaccinators in Pakistan, a country still threatened by polio. These murderers are radicals that believe vaccines are used to secretly sterilize Muslims and stunt their growth. Because of this tragedy, children will get sick, be permanently damaged, or die.
The Facebook group for the VRM must have only received the news of this event recently because the screenshots I have seen of their reaction to it are from February of this year. To sum them up, members of this group are applauding the cold-blooded murders. They are not only throwing their lot in with Muslim extremists in doing so, but one poster went so far as to say that this was “no worse than bombing an abortion clinic”, because apparently, this person backs domestic terrorists too. Other posters hailed the murders as self-defence against people that would “poison” children. One even claimed that she would be tempted to do the same if someone were to vaccinate her children.
We are all guilty of saying things we don’t mean in the heat of the moment on social media. We are all guilty of saying things without further explaining why we say them when sometimes an explanation makes all the difference. The last thing I am is an alarmist, and I certainly don’t want for the “thought police” to crack down and arrest people that have not committed a crime.
The people posting here seem like the comical stereotype of the anti-vaxxer, posting their outrage somewhere in between Mommy blogging about homeopathic remedies for chicken pox and hot yoga. What they are saying is not comical, however, when you realize that they are, again, throwing their lot in with terrorists, domestic and abroad. They support the murder of human beings in the name of pseudoscientific nonsense that is already getting people sick and posing a serious threat to public health. It’s not a great stretch to think that at some point, someone in the VRM or a similar group might walk into a suburban doctor’s office and open fire. It only takes one especially unhinged anti-vaxxer to act upon the twisted thoughts of the people who joke about and support the killing of those that would vaccinate children. It only takes one bullet to take one life. One life is too many.
The more radicalized the anti-vaxxers become, the more they bear watching. This has escalated from a group of people that don’t care if your child gets sick to a group of people that would applaud the murder of people out there trying to eradicate disease, or pull the trigger themselves. If the radical Muslim and the radical Christian pro-life activist are put on watch lists, shouldn’t some of these anti-vaxxers?
I don’t think that I am being an alarmist when I say that I think they should.

–Beagle