withasmoothroundstone:

vaccinate-educate:

Day 7: Vaccinating
protects you and others.

Herd (community) Immunity: indirectly protects those who
cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons (i.e. people with immune deficiency,
and those who cannot form immunity). Herd Immunity only works when enough people
are immunized in a population.

Herd Immunity works by stopping the spread of the disease.
If a virus is unable to infect a new host it will die. By being immunized,
there is less opportunity for the virus to thrive. It won’t be able to find a
new host and this decreases its chances of reaching people who cannot get
vaccinated.  

With the anti-vaccine movement, less people are being
vaccinated, and we are not at the proper level for herd immunity to work. This
is putting people at risk for catching these diseases and dying. The only way
to protect them is by vaccinating, and stop giving the disease opportunity to
spread.

Protect those who can’t protect themselves.

So much this. I’m on CellCept and steroids, both of which can fuck up the immune system (in fact that’s what CellCept is designed for – it’s normally used for people with transplants but also used In autoimmune disease which is why I take it), so this is huge.

My steroid bottles even come with this big warning label saying not to be around sick people. Unfortunately I’m going to be on steroids the rest of my life, and CellCept until and unless my body can finally tolerate the other therapies for myasthenia gravis. (I got meningitis from one of the two main alternatives, and I can’t do the other one until the bleeding hole in my stomach closes over, so it may be awhile if ever). So for the meantime I really don’t need to deal with unvaccinated people. And I know several people in similar positions to me who have gotten really sick, some of whom almost died, from exposure to unvaccinated children.

Unfortunately, there are people out there who literally say that people like me should not survive. They say it’s ~unnatural~ and that in the past before vaccines we would’ve all died off and that would be better because we’re weakening the human race by our continued existence or something. They don’t grasp that it’s quite possible they wouldn’t have been around either. And that in any case, it’s not their job to wish that kind of crap upon the world, like what right do they think they have to play judge over who should die off, and why do they believe that they’re (no pun intended) immune somehow, that they’d be spared as one of the ~stronger~ ones, when they have no such assurances at all? IDK, but it pisses me off.

And it’s one of the more dangerous forms of ableism, the ones that center around the idea that disabled people shouldn’t be alive. There’s many forms that can take, some of them very blatant, others very subtle. But in every form it comes in, it’s utterly toxic to the continued existence of disabled people. So in addition to avoiding anti-vax BS, try and avoid the rhetoric that paints some people as just automatically more deserving of life because they’re ~stronger~, too. That will help immunize people in a totally different way – against the idea that disabled people dying is ~natural~ and us living is ~unnatural~, and that our continued existence weakens the entire species, and all the deadly consequences of that belief.