Anti-Vax and a Bottle of Rum

Alright, I'm posting from my iPod for the first time since it got all appstored, so bear with any difference in formatting and all that. All future iPod posts will bear the "...and a Bottle of Rum" suffix in the title.

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Okay, this H1N1 thing has got the crazies coming out of the woodwork. "Injecting a disease in your arm is dangerous!" they shriek; "I knew someone who got crazy sick because of the flu vaccine!" they continue. All of it faster than you can say "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy" Which I guess is true of most phrases.

Here's the brass tacs: polio and smallpox are GONE. They don't exist in the western world BECAUSE of vaccination. Influenza mutates more quickly and dramatically, so we haven't been as lucky, but vaccines do help us build up partial immunities, so that if the strain we were vaccinated against comes around, we're unaffected and if some variation on that strain comes around, our odds of dying are significantly lower.

We don't have any native immunity to H1N1. The government of Canada is giving away vaccines. H1N1 is killing young adults and pregnant women. Smarten up, take an hour off work and take a god damned jab in the arm.

For better, more educated info, check out www.sciencebasedmedicine.org and glance at Thunderf00t on Youtube. The blog is obviously more complete than the videos.