Danehy: The Anti-Vax Crowd Sure Has Some Stupid Arguments

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As one goes through life and, through experience, gains wisdom and perspective, he/she finds that, in almost all cases, there are at least two sides to every issue. Except for when it comes to vaccines; there's only one side to that and that is that anti-vaxxers are the stupidest people on Earth. Even the ones who are able to speak in complete sentences are just smart enough to be stupid. They get a part of a piece of a tiny grain of an idea and then convince themselves that they have built Hadrian's Wall.

It is so frustrating, after what everybody on Earth has lived through (and many died from) over the past 16 months, to hear morons blather on about that of which they obviously know nothing. Their refusal to get vaccinated is causing people to get sick and die. It is also keeping their beloved economy from returning to full strength. And for what?

The excuses given are mind-boggling. They include:

  • I think I'm allergic.

How can you tell if you're allergic to something if you've never had it?! Sadly, I'm allergic to avocados. I know this because I used to love guacamole, but as I got older, I developed a vicious allergy. It started as a tiny tickle in my throat. But, after a couple years, I would take one bite and my face would look like Ben Grimm after being exposed to the cosmic rays.

It is possible to be allergic to a vaccine, but it's extremely rare and there's no way of knowing until you get it.

  • People are dying from the vaccine.

That's just a lie. It's not even worth bothering to refute it. Even most of Tucker Carlson's brain-dead viewers don't believe it and they'll believe just about anything.

  • The vaccine makes some people magnetic.

They can't even get the lie right. The original lie was that there was some kind of metal being injected into people, enough to make a magnet stick to the injection site. This was completely false and quickly debunked. Actually, the original, original lie was that Bill Gates was using the vaccination effort to implant microchips in our bodies. That, too, has been proven to be completely false. But, through the evil that is TikTok, the lie has now morphed into the government is injecting us with magnets.

Stupid is as anti-vaxxer does.

  • And my least-favorite, the vaccine can cause fertility issues. (Again, not true. The disease itself can mess with fertility; the vaccine, no.)

A young woman whom I used to coach in basketball contacted me a couple weeks ago and asked if she could use me as a reference for a job for which she was applying. We had a brief conversation; I asked her how she and her family were doing. Since she's not yet 21 and still in college, I asked her if she had had the opportunity to get vaccinated yet. When she told me that she wasn't going to get vaccinated, I was flabbergasted. She's usually a smart kid.

When I asked her why, she said, "It's because the vaccine causes fertility issues and I want to have kids someday."

I said, "Dude, you need to stay off the internet. All that false information can make you null and void."

She's a great kid and I didn't want to lecture her, but doggone it! I told her that saying that a vaccine can affect fertility issues is like saying that playing softball makes you better at English.

The unholy alliance of the anti-vaxxers and Fox News (and its copycat "networks") have been pushing this and other ridiculous claims in a feeble attempt to derail President Biden's wildly successful (and popular) national vaccination effort. They got somebody claiming to be a doctor to suggest that the vaccine might cause a person's body to attack the protein synctin-1, which is in a woman's placenta and shares a tiny bit of genetic code with the coronavirus' spike protein.

One of the best reactions to that nonsense that I have read comes from (real) Dr. Laura Morris from the University of Missouri. Says Dr. Morris: "A good analogy for your immune system to get mixed up and attack the placental protein would be like you mistaking an elephant for an alley cat because they're both gray. There is one small similarity but the overall constructions of the proteins are so completely different, your immune system is way too smart to be confused by that."

What is most frustrating in this whole matter is the blatant hypocrisy being exhibited by the nouveau (Trump-inspired) anti-vaxxers. Many of the people in the wide swath of right-wingers who are refusing to get vaccinated are the same people who were storming state capitols with assault weapons last summer, screaming that the lockdown was doing more harm than the disease itself. They called on the government(s) to do everything possible to open businesses back up for the resurgence of the economy and the mental well-being of all Americans.

That was not a totally unreasonable argument, but now that there is a clear and incontrovertible method for doing that very thing that they wanted, they're refusing to do the one simple thing that can save lives and bring the American economy roaring back.

They call themselves patriots; they're really just hypocrites.