On with the foolishness!

Bill Gates has spoken quite a bit about population reduction, and the relationship to vaccines. He has described communities where parents have 8 children, not because they want 8 children, but because they know that in all probability a high percentage of them will die in childhood. So, using vaccines to reduce infant mortality, over time, causes parents to have fewer children, because those parents have a realistic expectation that more of their children will live. Lots of links if you want to read about it.

What Gates said was along the lines of "we have 6.x billion people, and we are heading for 9 billiion. Vaccination programs can reduce that."

Note that he didn't say reduce 6 billion, he said reduce the growth, ie the rate of increase. The growth fueled by parents having 8 children, and expecting a percentage of their children to die young. We know vaccines work. We know that our increased life expectancy has to do with greatly reduced infant mortality, among other things. So why shouldn't the third world get access to vaccines? It becomes a moral imperative.

Yes, in the above example, vaccines can be said to reduce (future) populations (and the growth in populations, more importantly). But what did the Nutcase News say? They said that the WHO (and others) admitted that vaccines reduced populations. They said that Gates said it too. Of course they did! But the headlines didn't accurately portray the story. And then some conspiracist got on the case, and said that the WHO actually had vaccines that killed a portion of the kids who got them, and they were doing it on purpose. That is why they are called the Nutcase News.

And now those same news stories and web sites (Alex Jones? Seriously?) are being quoted by posters here as 'proof' that vaccines are bad.

Time to connect some dots. Not the ones that describe a conspiracy. The ones that show that the media is very easily able to manipulate readers when they want to. That would be a better subject to debate than whether we should use vaccines, which is simply a stand in for any one of the many issues that are being warped and distorted by junk science, scam artists, and a media that thinks it can fool its readers. Unfortunately, they are being proven to be correct.

And so the foolishness continues.

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