Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. To be up front, I am pro-vaccination. I believe that if you have no previous medical conditions preventing you from having your vaccinations, you should have them.
That being said, I can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do and I do my best to respect other people’s opinions and life choices.
But this latest anti-vaxx meme is just too much. It’s fear mongering at its worst.
The image originally appeared on the Facebook group called “Feminists Against Vaccination” who describe themselves as a page that “exists to support women in their decision to abstain from vaccinations for both themselves and their children”. Note: As of 26/03/2015 at 10:30am the Facebook Group has either become private or has been removed.
That’s all well and good until we get to this:
“Feminists Against Vaccination” captioned this image with this lovely, truthful, completely 100% factual caption:
Studies have shown that vaccines serve as a gateway drug to heroin. The patriarchy has been known to employ the use of heroin to keep women under their power by keeping them addicted. #ResistVaccines #ResistHeroin.
Dear god.
And this Facebook Group is completely serious. This is not a joke to them. They truly believe these asinine statements and are perpetuating them by sharing them across social media.
What is a joke is the image itself… actually. According to EvidencePlease.net—a site that we assume looked into the mem based on its ludicrous statistic—explains how this image came to exist.
This graphic was created as a part of Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday in 2013, in which SA forum participants tried to create over the top parodies of anti-vaccination posters. After showing some examples of actual anti-vaccination memes, the SA admins issued a challenge: “If they can take anti-vaccination posters to this level of absurdity, imagine what we can!”
It seems that this poster was one that managed to filter into the general public without the safety blanket of context.
Is there Really a fool left that does Not realize how based and Wrong snopes usually is?! IF (and that’s a big one) there are any ‘scientific studies’ that actually purport this, then I’m betting they are those Non-scientific ‘studies’ that probably made the mistake of, for example, using recent US data: where the population studied was Already 97% vaccinated! Therefore, OF COURSE, the ‘study’ would result in the bigger group being ‘more likely’ to inject drugs!!
ok – time to take it down a few notches – Really? Here is some reality:
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/heroinvaccine.asp