Creduleft (3)

James R. Copland, Paul Howard writing today at City Journal, cover the issue of vaccinations in the Modern world, and in that we see that it's not just Muslims acting like European peasants in the Middle Ages: some up-scale Californians are as superstitious as many Muslims we might meet. I extend that to most Leftists, those who are so wrapped up in the pseudo-science of scientism that they are as credulous as witch-burners and pogromists in Russia. Those who rail about Sarah Palin are no different from those who, in earlier times, were on about witches and Jooos. It is credulity.

Writing about the growth of whooping cough in California, Copland and Howard state: "[M]ore and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all.". California, not Nigeria.

[....]

Parental concerns about vaccine safety are mostly wrongheaded. Plaintiffs’ lawyers, eager to translate junk science into jury awards, have long spread misinformation about the dangers of vaccination. They’ve been especially successful among the affluent and well-educated, presumably because those groups have greater access to vaccine pseudoscience.

[....]

In California’s wealthy Marin County, public health official Fred Schwartz reports that parents are “signing waivers to opt out of immunizing kindergarten-bound children.” About 7 percent of all children entering kindergarten in Marin County are unvaccinated, the seventh-highest percentage among California’s 58 counties. It isn’t surprising, then, that Marin County accounts for 15 percent of all California whooping-cough cases, despite having just 0.67 percent of the state’s population.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0202phjc.html

We might argue that if the intelligentsia in Marin county, the richest and smartest and best educated in the nation, are subjecting their children to whooping cough, then they must know something we idiots who like Sarah Palin do not know. And I agree. They know scientism, a ludicrous belief in science as religion. Their children die due to this credulity. How different are those in America's wealthiest and most successful neighbourhoods different from Muslims obscurantists in Nigeria?

From an old post here, look at Nigeria and other nations to see if there is a significant difference between those places and people and Marin county, California.

Polio is spreading most rapidly in Nigeria and Indonesia, and new cases have cropped up in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mali, Cameroon, Chad and Eritrea. All told, the number of polio cases worldwide has dropped drastically, from 350,000 in 1988 to 483 in 2001. But last year the figure rose to more than 700.

Rumors have been circulating in Indonesia that polio vaccinations are contrary to Islamic dietary law and are a plot by Christians to secretly sterilize Muslim women and introduce the HIV virus. Similar rumours precipitated a 2003 Nigerian outbreak, when Muslim leaders in the country's northern Kano state forbade inoculations for 10 months. The declaration was later rescinded, though the polio virus has since spread across Africa and to Asia.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2005/11/polio-in-islamic-countries-is-said-to.html

Sarah Palin is an idiot. Using a cell phone will give you brain cancer. Using a cell phone will make your dick drop off. Or vaccinations will make you go blind.

Muslim clerics' warning of U.S. plot hinders measles vaccinations

The human cost of the paranoia fueled by jihadists. From AP, with thanks to Twostellas:

KANO, Nigeria -- Accusations by Islamic preachers that vaccines are part of an American anti-Islamic plot are threatening efforts to combat a measles epidemic that has killed hundreds of Nigerian children, health workers say.

Government officials play down the anti-vaccine sentiment, but all the measles deaths have been in Nigeria's north, where authorities had to suspend polio immunizations last year after hard-line clerics fanned similar fears of that vaccine.

Nigeria, whose 130 million people make it Africa's most populous nation, has recorded 20,859 measles cases so far this year. At least 589 victims have died, most of them children younger than 5 and all in the north, the Nigerian Red Cross and the U.N. World Health Organization say.

Southern Nigeria, which is mainly Christian, had only 253 measles cases, and no deaths.

Health services are much better in the south. But the anti-vaccination sentiment in the north, evident from interviews with parents, seems to be a factor.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/03/muslim-clerics-warning-of-us-plot-hinders-measles-vaccinations.html

Yuppies in Marin county, peasants in Nigeria, the Middle Ages? Who can tell the difference any more?