New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie: Science Denier

[BoyNextDoor]

Christie believes that public health and public health policy on vaccinations should be left up to the choice of the parents, despite the unquestionable science about the public health benefits.

However, he also thinks you need to lock up nurses that are doing humanitarian work fighting Ebola, again despite the science of how the virus is transmitted.

What's next? Praying for rain and for a good crop?

 

[Wrong Element]

That's weird. Anti-vaccine sentiment is usually associated with modern day SoCal hippies, not a huge demographic in a Republican primary.

Is there a libertarian "if the government wants me to give my kid a shot, that's just proof it's a bad idea" faction out there? Because otherwise it's bizarre he'd say that out loud, which is a separate thing from believing it.

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

That's weird. Anti-vaccine sentiment is usually associated with modern day SoCal hippies, not a huge demographic in a Republican primary.

Is there a libertarian "if the government wants me to give my kid a shot, that's just proof it's a bad idea" faction out there? Because otherwise it's bizarre he'd say that out loud, which is a separate thing from believing it.

I'm guessing that he hasn't anticipated the question and therefore, did not have time to form his "truthful" answer.

 

[cjh]

That's weird. Anti-vaccine sentiment is usually associated with modern day SoCal hippies, not a huge demographic in a Republican primary.

Is there a libertarian "if the government wants me to give my kid a shot, that's just proof it's a bad idea" faction out there? Because otherwise it's bizarre he'd say that out loud, which is a separate thing from believing it.

There are rumblings in our statehouse to expand the categories of exemptions from vaccines.

 

[sr71plt]

And to isolate those not getting them from each other and from the general population, I hope. Their rights stop where the rights of others begin.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Is there a libertarian "if the government wants me to give my kid a shot, that's just proof it's a bad idea" faction out there?

I dunno, but there's definitely an "if Obama thinks it's a good idea, then it's a bad idea" faction, and it is to them Christie is pandering here.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Is it a Libertarian thing to be against vaccinations? That seems strange to me.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

And to isolate those not getting them from each other and from the general population, I hope. Their rights stop where the rights of others begin.

They should certainly pay higher premiums!

 

[Wrong Element]

Is it a Libertarian thing to be against vaccinations? That seems strange to me.

I really hope not, because if a belief in the efficacy of vaccinations starts becoming a partisan matter -- that is, if people begin adjusting their beliefs to fit in with the side they think they're supposed to be on, which we've already seen with climate change -- it's going to be a disaster for American public health.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Is it a Libertarian thing to be against vaccinations? That seems strange to me.

I'm sure it's not a Libertarian thing to accept the anti-vaxxers' theories, but it would be a Libertarian thing to resist government compulsion or interference in personal and family health decisions. Remember, these are people who think if you want to do smack or coke -- or drink paint thinner, I suppose -- it's none of the state's business.

 

[phrodeau]

Libertarians are the first to decry people with poor parenting skills. They should be pointing out the necessity of personal responsibility to get one's children vaccinated.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Just saw this article in the LA Times. Rand Paul believes vaccines link to mental disorders.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-christie-vaccine-20150202-story.html

 

[phrodeau]

Just saw this article in the LA Times. Rand Paul believes vaccines link to mental disorders.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-christie-vaccine-20150202-story.html

And busybody puts beads and rattles on our President, while his favorite politicians spew medical advice further afield of any witch doctor.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Christie and the whole of the GOP went into full retreat today. Paul went do far as to tweet a photo of himself getting a booster shot.

Hillary's tweet was a riot:

http://videos.usatoday.net/Brightcove2/29906170001/2015/02/29906170001_4029717216001_video-still-for-video-4029675097001.jpg

 

[domroger]

Just saw this article in the LA Times. Rand Paul believes vaccines link to mental disorders.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-christie-vaccine-20150202-story.html

To be fair there are a lot of parents who think that the MMR vaccine caused their children's autism .

 

[KingOrfeo]

To be fair there are a lot of parents who think that the MMR vaccine caused their children's autism .

Yes, but there are very few doctors who think that.

 

[1sickbastard]

Remember, these are people who think if you want to do smack or coke -- or drink paint thinner, I suppose -- it's none of the state's business.

True, but with the reasonable caveat that doing whatever doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Becoming a vector for spreading a preventable, communicable disease would be considered such an infringement. At least by the Libertarians with whom I've had conversations. Among those I have had conversations, there seems to be the notion that pragmatism and practicality trump ideological purity, but that may be due to my having interacted with a small sample of Libertarians that generally disassociate themselves with the tin-foil hat loonies.

 

[1sickbastard]

To be fair there are a lot of parents who think that the MMR vaccine caused their children's autism .

Which was based on a single, highly flawed study which was later retracted by the author.
This is one of those cases where the internet has become a tool for spreading ignorance. It doesn't help there are celebufucktards who continue to flog this disinformation to keep themselves in some sort of spotlight because otherwise they'd fade into well-deserved obscurity for being no-talent hacks. These are the same sort of e-listers who pop up on reality shows and 'celebrity' competitions.

 

[Busybody]

this is a SHIT thread

the ONLY thread you need on this subject is here

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=64901255&posted=1#post64901255

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

I dunno, but there's definitely an "if Obama thinks it's a good idea, then it's a bad idea" faction, and it is to them Christie is pandering here.

This is pretty much the entire thing in a nutjob-shell as far as GOP politicians are concerned.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Christie and the whole of the GOP went into full retreat today. Paul went do far as to tweet a photo of himself getting a booster shot.

Hillary's tweet was a riot:

http://videos.usatoday.net/Brightcove2/29906170001/2015/02/29906170001_4029717216001_video-still-for-video-4029675097001.jpg

I've been a bit surprised that the Fox 'n Friends angst over vaccinations hasn't spread to this board.

I suspect that a number of conservatives....probably most....have already vaccinated their kids, but don't want to mention it because it runs counter to #TehNarrative that the conservative talking heads are promoting.

I'd guess Julybabby04 hasn't vaccinated her kids (coz it's not in the Bible) and VatAss probably hasn't because the cost is too prohibitive. 4est_4est_Gump likely hasn't vaccinated his "daughter" but she's not his real daughter so I'll give him a pass. Oh, and since query walked out on his kids when the youngest was 4, I seriously doubt if he knows if his kids were vaccinated or not.

 

[Wrong Element]

To be fair there are a lot of parents who think that the MMR vaccine caused their children's autism .

Yeah, a lot of people believe stupid shit, which doesn't make it any less stupid.


I was pleased that Ben Carson remembered he was a doctor and issued an unambiguous defense of the effectiveness of vaccinations on Monday when this first became an issue. Then he remembered he was Ben Carson, and decided to blame the measles outbreak on illegal immigrants.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Elias Isquith:

Something happened on Monday, something I expect we’ll see many more times before the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential primary is said and done: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul inadvertently affirmed their critics’ worst assumptions, and earned widespread ridicule from the media in the process. But something else happened that day, something I also expect we’ll see repeated in the years to come: All of the attention devoted to these two politicians’ missteps distracted us from what still remains one of the most important political development of our time — the pervasiveness of a crude, anti-social understanding of American individualism.

<snip>

So Christie and Paul had a bad day. What makes their bad day important, however, isn’t so much what it tells us about them as individuals, but rather what it says about the voters they’re courting so assiduously. While many lefties are likely to assume that the anti-vaccination movement is simply another manifestation of conservative ambivalence about science, the truth is that the vaccination truther impulse appears to be cross-ideological. Run into an anti-vaxxer, as they’re called, and you’re just as likely to find yourself face-to-face with an archetypal San Francisco liberal as an archetypal Dallas Tea Partyer. President Obama recently urged parents to vaccinate their children, so it may eventually end up as a partisan issue. But as of now, the anti-vaxxers’ prominence speaks to something deeper in American society.

What that “something deeper” is, I can’t definitively say. But I think we recently got a glimpse of it from a third source, who did us all a favor by expressing a common sentiment with an uncommon lack of grace. Monday was a bad day not only for would-be presidents, but for an Arizona cardiologist and anti-vaxxer, Jack Wolfson, who earned his 15 minutes of infamy during an interview with CNN. Asked by a CNN reporter whether he would struggle to live with himself if he found out that a child with an immunodeficiency had died after catching a virus from one of his non-vaccinated kids, Wolfson, with a chilling lack of affect, responded with a firm no. “I could live with myself easily,” Wolfson said. “It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. And I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child … It’s not my responsibility to be protecting [someone else’s] child.”

To be clear, the borderline sociopathy manifested in Wolfson’s answer is hardly widespread — that’s part of the reason his interview got so much attention. But the basic premise of the worldview Wolfson shared — which holds that American society isn’t a single community so much as a massive collection of individual families, and that these millions of families owe nothing to one another beyond the bare minimum, expressed in the pseudo-legal language of “responsibility” — is far from unique. The most famous articulation of the idea probably comes from the U.K.’s Margaret Thatcher, who once declared there was “no such thing as society.” But it’s been one of the key tenets of Americans’ self-perception for a while now, and has become ever more rigid and prominent as of late.

 

[dan_c00000]

If I was Christie I'd be more worried about my eventual busting by an ethics committee.

Last month, Mr. Christie prompted a state ethics inquiry after he flew to at least three games of the Dallas Cowboys, his team since boyhood, on the plane of the owner, Jerry Jones, whose company had received a contract with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey after the governor recommended it.

Not a good track record.

 

[KingOrfeo]

If I was Christie I'd be more worried about my eventual busting by an ethics committee.

If I were Christie I'd be more worried about a heart attack.