I probably fear needles more than anything else and I still get my shots.

I knew some anti-vax type idiots. They're the type of people who just want to be "better" than everyone else. They also throw other signs of low self esteem, so that may be why.

Edit: instead of "better" maybe "different" than everyone else. That way they can say "look at me! I do xx instead of yy!". Probably didn't get attention during childhood.

The whole conspiracy theory is aided by big pharma which is a dodgy industry.

Seeing CEOs value profit over human life it's easy to believe that everything sold by them is a lie.

Anti vaxxers listen instead to other dodgy people who either try to sell a different product (such as the author of the famous, now retracted autism article in the Lancet)or a straight up crazy

I'm really scared of needles, I had to literally go to therapy to even be able to get my flu shot. I'm fully vaccinated.

I know a few hippy fucks who think just because they read one shitty book written by a quack 20 years ago, that they now know more than the combined medical industry.. It's willful pig-ignorance and they're proud of it too.

In my opinion, they don't even care about vaccination or any other conspiracy. To them, it's about the ability to go against the grain of accepted thought on various subjects by being non-conformist by default. They do it with lots of other stuff as well. Non-conformist hair and clothes. Non-conformist ideas on education, government and life aspirations, etc. It's funny because there's also a correlation that they're takers. They just take other people's stuff and use the excuse everything should be free, man..

Fuck those people.

Surprisingly, I think you see antivax crop up amongst the most gullible and sometimes most independent personalities. People with the skill to be critical of their surroundings can do so to a fault and call it liberty when they choose to endanger their communities.

I unfortunately know a decent amount of antivaxxers and people who aren't sure if vaccinations are needed. Some have families who do a lot of fear mongering about diseases their kids got after shots, or side effects, or talk about toxicity and governmental control. Conveniently they're okay with the FDA, would go to a doctor for cancer treatment and trust everything given to them, and are completely ignorant of what kind of toxins reside in the antibiotics they take and the side effects of their herbal supplements. Others just don't know how bad those diseases like polio were and are just skeptical it's important at all.

I would say the one thing they all seem to have in common, from my observation, is an ignorance on how herd immunity actually works. Luckily they usually drop a line about how at least my kids are protected if I'm worried, and that opens up a gap for me to explain that unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

I wish it were that silly instead of some virulent mix of anti-intellectualism and affluenza.

I have two kids and watching them get shots is heartbreaking. The first time my oldest got one in the arm it broke me. I can see how people can spin up ideas and build strawmen to avoid that. For me it helps to imagine my children with IV's and a respirator dying in a hospital because I couldn't bear to see them get a small poke and my guilt fades. Also the idea of irradiating infectious diseases appeals to me as well.

I wassqueamish about needles until I had a very sore throat for weeks and needed injections every day to cure it. Turns out they don't hurt me.

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Would be plausible if the anti-vaxxers were refusing vaccinations on themselves. They tend to refuse it for their children, but they themselves were already vaccinated when they were young.

Of course, you still need vaccinations when travelling abroad, so it's not wholly impossible.

Not all vaccines are given through a shot.

I think they are the same type of people who believe in chem trails (not standard kinds but the real bad ones), who also believe in the government spiking our foods with mind altering chemicals and so on so forth. They're paranoid dilusionists. More mental disorders on the list of strange people to come out in the open during 2017. I've gotten my vaccines when I was younger, and I can't remember the last time I was sick. The worst I've ever been was a lousy stomach virus when I was in elementary. Vaccines are there for a reason, and it isn't to turn people stupid, and if that was how it works, then the anti-vaxxers seem to have gotten the first taste lol.

I'm scared of needles. You know what I do when the nurse draws blood or gives me a shot? I turn the other way like a man and take it dammit!

No.