The Anti Vaxxer

Post Reply New Topic

My father is an anti vaxxer. He believes in many ridiculous conspiracy theories but one of his favourites is that vaccines are designed to give us slow mercury poisoning.

He says not a single disease has been eliminated by vaccines. I suggested that polio was eliminated by vaccines back in the 1950s and he said the reason polio was eliminated was because of improvements to "toilet hygiene". He then claimed that polio had been nearly wiped out before the polio vaccine was introduced.

I asked him, if vaccines are designed to give everyone mercury poisoning than how can I still be alive having a flu shot last week? He claimed the vaccines are designed to cause a gradual build up of mercury over years, increasing each time the vaccine is administered. He claimed that mercury cannot be eliminated from the body? Is this true? Can't non lethal doses of mercury be peed out?

Fortunately he hasn't made the claim that vaccines cause autism (yet). He seems to think to vaccines are designed to slowly poison people for purposes such as population control, keeping people in a persistent state of mild sickness or keeping people to stupid to see what he considers to be "The Truth".

He sent me a link to one of his wacky conspiracy theory websites that said intravenous injections of vitamin C to cure diseases were banned by the FDA. I suggested they were banned because they didn't work for the stated purpose of curing diseases. He said they do work and they were banned because the FDA wants to keep people sick.

He claimed that vitamin C injections can cure cancer, ebola and AIDS. Of course these are three very different diseases so they wouldn't all have the same cure.

I asked "where is your proof" and he sent me a link to a website run by a nutty conspiracy theorist. He does that every time I ask for evidence for his claims. He always sends me a link to a webpage wherein another guy makes the same claim.

He says I can't prove that mainstream science is correct. True. I can't. My background in science isn't strong enough. I could send him links to websites that explain how effective vaccines are but that would be rather pointless after I've told him that links to webpages aren't evidence because people can say anything on the web. It would make me a hypocrite.

I told him that links from an organisation that calls itself the Australian Vaccine Skeptics Network probably isn't going to be neutral on the subject of vaccines. All their articles sound very biased. He could just as easily claim any contrary webpages have a pro vaccine bias.

I told him he believes claims made by anti vaxxer websites without evidence. He said I believe claims made by mainstream science and medicine without evidence. Perhaps I do in a way. While I think that scientific evidence for all their claims must exist, you'd have to be a scientist to understand some of it.

Some scientific proofs may be incomprehensible to people without a postgrad education in science so us normal people end up taking it on faith. How can I argue a matter of faith when I told him that his claims require evidence other than a webpage that agrees with him?

Being unemployed gives him enough time to read a lot of these conspiracy theory websites. When he starts thinking for himself (trying to create his own original conspiracy theories) he's just guessing. Working stuff out by assumption. I don't think reading stuff written by some guy on the internet counts as evidence and I don't think him working stuff out by himself counts as evidence yet for most of us, our beliefs come from either hearing them from someone else or thinking of them ourselves.

With my lack of scientific background and his willingness to believe anything so long as it's not mainstream I can't argue effectively against him. True I can look science stuff up on the internet but than it's just stuff written by some guy onto a website. I don't have the formal scientific education required to prove something scientifically first hand.

Our debates nearly descend into arguments of epistemology. He spams links to ridiculous websites that make ridiculous websites while I send him links to more mainstream websites. Yet if he can't know for certain that his websites are telling the truth how can I know for certain that my websites are telling the truth? We're both trusting what someone else wrote.

Smallpox. It took almost 200 years but it has been done.

But if he's conspiracy theory believer, there is no reason to waste your time, he will reject any argument you bring up. I would just give it up. Is he responsible for not vaxing anyone?

I don't think so. He keeps peddling his nonsense to the few people who'll listen. Maybe he'll convince once of his church buddies to not vax.

He'll probably say smallpox was eliminated by improvements to personal hygiene. But how does he know was the cause? Wishful thinking.

It's nasty, but I'm content to let anti-vaxxers, people who drink "raw water," and others who subscribe to new age horsecrud, eliminate themselves from the gene pool.

It's weird, but it seems like many people in Western civilization want to revert to neolithic manners of living. I say, let them.

All I need is testimony from polio survivors and whatnot to convince me that vaccines are the way.

Unfortunately, not so simple.
The humanity survived the pre-vaxing times, higher child mortality and a number of cripples did not exterminate them.
Additionally, in the countries with public healthcare, taxpayers finance treatments for preventable diseases.

But my personal expirience with conspiracy believers is – you won't persuade them. Any information you bring up will be "fabricated by the conspiracy"

Has your father ever been vaccinated OP?

Sounds like your dad has rounded the bend.



Was he always into that kinda stuff? Like when you were a child? Or did this onset recently?

That's a good point. Anti vaxxers won't remove themselves from the gene pool because some of them will survive. With modern medicine they could survive some of the diseases (at far greater expense to the taxpayer and with far higher risk of infecting someone else then if they never got the disease). A few people can't be vaccinated and may have compromised immune systems. It would be a sad irony if modern medicine saved an anti vaxxer but couldn't save the person he infected.

Another reason anti vaxxers won't remove themselves from the gene pool is because many of them are on the religious right and so tend to have more kids. Many of them are against abortion, so they have more kids. Some of them may even be members of the Quiverfull movement. If a Quiverfull dad has 16 kids and half of them die from preventable diseases, than he will still have more surviving kids than the average person.

More importantly they won't remove themselves from the meme pool because they could spread their ideas to people who aren't genetically related to them. Ideas do not need a genetic connection to spread. The anti vaxxers are highly evangelistic. They'll talk to anyone who'll listen even after they've made it clear they don't believe that stuff. They could talk the legs off a mountain goat. Most people get bored by their endless waffle but a few people will inevitably believe it.

Ideas may not need a genetic connection to spread but kids tend to be more trusting of family members, whether or not those family members are telling the truth. If GF and I ever have kids I'm sure dad will want to spread his baloney to them. A young child will not have the critical thinking skills to work out it's BS. I remember when I was a boy I used to love all that fringe stuff (aliens, etc) and I used to believe every word of it without asking for evidence.

Some of dad's stories about how "Agenda 21 is going to kill 90% of the world's population and you have a 9/10 chance of being killed" may be scary for a young child. If GF ever convinces me to give her kids I'd prefer for them to be weary of actual threats, not make believe ones. And I certainly wouldn't want them to believe his Holocaust denial nonsense.

He's always been into that stuff but lately it's gotten worse due a combination of factors. Firstly, he used to work full time. Now he's unemployed. They say idle hands are the devil's playthings. Now he has a lot more time to "research".

I think it must be boring for him, without a job. This gives him a (false) sense of purpose. I think it may even help his self-esteem. Losing his job deflated him but this gives him the (false) sense that he's part of the intellectual elite who knows all New World Order's secrets.

The other factor is the internet. 30 years ago this Illuminati, New World Order, Lord Rothschild bullcrap used to spread through word of mouth or occasionally through books. Today, the internet allows him to find hundreds of new conspiracy theories every day.

He has a tendency to believe nonsense without any evidence. When I ask for evidence for his claims, he'll send me a link to one of his conspiracy websites and act like Joe the blogger saying the same thing he just said counts as evidence. I try to explain to him that that's just another guy making the same claim but he doesn't get it.

He tends to be critical of scientists and the government (especially if they're on the left) but he (or his conspiracy blogs) put words in their mouths with uncited quotations. For example, he recently said that an Australian politician said he was planning to ban all religious people from serving in Parliament. I'm sure no politician said this because it would be political suicide.

I think much of his hatred of scientists and the left comes from reading quotes of things they didn't actually say. He doesn't understand that I'd prefer to read such a quote directly from the source or at least from a website that isn't openly anti-science or anti-left. He doesn't understand that you should never believe quotes sourced from someone's critics. With the internet and an abundance of free time he can get far more of these false quotes.

For me it's a problem of epistemology. Scientists prove things meticulously except most of the people who believe scientists are not scientists themselves.

How can I tell him to trust scientists after I've told him not to trust anyone at their word?

Not recently. I think he had the standard childhood vaccinations.