They can’t wait to help others in the community
Antivax nurse brags about deliberately infecting children with chicken pox. @qldhealthnews @QldPolice #StopAVN
I tried to find the post on the Stop Mandatory Vaccination Facebook page but gave up, but an Australian news outlets reports the story:
An apparent push by an anti-vaxxer mum from Brisbane to contaminate Halloween lollies with chicken pox then distribute them to others is being investigated by police.
Pro-vaccination charity Light for Riley has shared a screenshot of a post to the Facebook page Stop Mandatory Vaccination in which the woman claims to want to “help others with natural immunity”.
“So my beautiful son (name redacted) has the chicken pox at the moment and we’ve both decided to help others with natural immunity this Halloween!” the post reads.
The person claims to have the opening and closing of packaging “down pat”.
…
It’s unclear whether the author’s post was a joke or not.
However, Greg Hughes, who started Light for Riley to promote the importance of immunisation after his baby son Riley died of whooping cough, slammed the post.
“Have you ever seen something that instantaneously makes your skin crawl?” he said on Facebook.
He lamented the “plan to intentionally infect other people’s children unknowingly by distributing contaminated lollipops to the community” and questioned why the parent would be “excited” by their child being infected with chicken pox.
He was also concerned the woman behind the post’s social media profile contained information indicating she was a nurse at a Brisbane hospital.
When contacted by 7NEWS.com.au for comment, Queensland Health stated they had no current or former employees who shared the name of the poster.
“This is a serious issue and has been referred to police, who are investigating,” a spokesman said.
People are disappointing.
Whether this was real, a trolling hoax, or wishful thinking, that person is one sick fuck.
Isn’t it illegal in Australia to mail infected lollipops?
Probably, which is probably why the police are investigating.
It astonishes me how many nurses I’ve met that are anti-vax. My mother-in-law’s nurse that attended her right before she died had a grandbaby born, and advised her daughter not to vaccinate the child. My mother-in-law had the right response when she heard that: “Well, she might as well just go drown the baby in the lake right now!”
Why, oh why, do people who take required biology classes and medical classes fall for such anti-scientific nonsense?
There’s anti-vax (irrational, selfish), and then there’s actively pro-disease (wicked, criminal).
Iknklast, one of my friends is married to an ex-nurse. I love her dearly, but she completely buys into the anti-vax anti-pharma conspiracies. Early on in their relationship we had a screaming row about it. In her case I think it was because she saw things in the medical profession that she didn’t like and felt were wrong and has projected that onto pretty much everything associated with it.
For years, there was ‘continuing education’ credit for nurses to study ‘Therapeutic Touch.’ The irrationality and utter debunking of the whole practice had no effect on the profession. Of course, TT was invented by a nurse, so there’s an insider prejudice from the start.
#7, the nurse I mentioned above practiced TT, and insisted on giving herbals to my mother-in-law, ones that had no earthly benefit. Since they were not known to cause harm, we didn’t force the issue as long as she gave her the proper medications she needed.
Unfortunately, education (and the practice of a profession) often just gives people a very narrow range of knowledge, but feeds their ego enough that Dunning-Krueger effects abound. Doctors get themselves into all kinds of stupid, sometimes fraudulent, investment schemes, because they’re rich enough to exploit, lack the knowledge to protect themselves, yet are so confident that they’re too smart to get ripped off that they don’t protect themselves. Engineers are notorious for declaring that every other discipline is simple and/or fundamentally wrong (“here, let me show you my proof that Einstein Was Wrong!”). It’s even been suggested to me that lawyers can be obnoxious know-it-alls.
This can even be true within someone’s broad area of supposed expertise. I remember one lawyer who specialized in a particular area of law who would show up at other departments’ lunch seminars, either for the free food or the continuing legal education credits, and make bizarre assertions about what the law was — or would be if only someone adopted his brilliant argument — in a field he clearly knew nothing about, in front of people who were experts in that field. So yeah, I can totally believe that a nurse in geriatrics would fancy herself an expert on pediatrics and immunology.
Screechy, everyone in my college is an expert on my field – except me, apparently. I don’t tell the auto mechanics how to auto mechanic, but they sure tell me how to do ecology. I don’t tell the economists how to do economics but they sure as hell believe they know more about environmental science than I do, with my years of experience and advanced degrees – and all they know is what they read on some google site that happened to say what they wanted.
Nurses tend to get a wide but shallow swath of science in many areas, and critical thinking is not the focus. The focus is learning body parts and nursing skills. Same with doctors. Many of them have no idea how statistics operate, or research, or double blinded trials. They just accept what the pharmacy reps tell them, because they focused in tightly on their own field. But all too many of them don’t know that, so when they get a wild hare about vaccinations, or some other piece of nonsense (like the power of prayer, for instance), they will believe they know more about it than the ordinary people who are just researching it on the internet – which is what they themselves are doing.