In today's culture of paranoia and fear, I genuinely believe that what I'm going to write about may actually be important. Of course, that might just be the folly of a teenager trying to make his blog work, take it as you will.
Of all the recent fads and phenomenons, the one that has bothered, bugged and baffled me the most is vaccine hesitancy, the anti-vaxxers as they are commonly known.
A quick history lesson, the sentiment of "vaccines are dangerous" started in 1998, when British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield decided that the MMR vaccine predisposed children to "behavioural regression and pervasive development disorder". Autism. This is where the idea of vaccines cause autism came from, and with the development of the internet and quickening of the spread of information, the MMR vaccination rate genuinely began to drop. Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license the following year.
But of course, the damage had been done, and the movement is stronger than ever. Yippee. I myself have had many internal debates as to whether there's genuine concern about vaccine safety or if these people are just nut-jobs.
Yeah. Definitely nut-jobs.
Of course this is old news, what really inspired me to write this article is something I read about recently, and it’s related to the topic of miracle cures, a product called Miracle Mineral Supplement.
After researching the topic I’m not even sure where to begin on this product, its creator and its proponents. Why don’t we start with the fact that the original proponent of MMS, Jim Humble, believes that he is a “billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy”.
Kinda want to let that sink in for a little bit. And I thought the people in the video above were lunatics, this guy just raised the bar, ironically, to the moon.
MMS is essentially sodium chlorite in distilled water, which when mixed with citric acid forms chorine dioxide, or in layman’s terms, industrial strength bleach! Now this would be fine if they were selling bathroom cleaner or disinfectant, but no, the real kicker here is that they claim it cures HIV, malaria, autism and of course, cancer among many many more. What's even better is the exorbitant prices they ask you to pay, disguised as donations to the Genesis II Church.
It’s ridiculous and very, very dangerous. Of course, the claims have all been disproven as the only ‘proof’ of this working is anecdotes from the billion-year-old god’s book, which is…untrustworthy to say the least. There have been multiple cases of patients becoming violently ill, and the worst part of it all, they tell the patients that that is supposed to happen. They tell them that after taking your dosage of bleach, you will be sick and you will get better afterwards. One of those is a lie, I’ll leave you to figure that one out.
So why do people trust these movements and products? Why is it that they turn away from modern medicine and gravitate towards unproven methods of treatment? The bottom line is, people believe in these things, the refusal of vaccines and the acceptance of alternative, unproven forms of medicine, because they can't handle the cards that life has dealt them, and they want, rather need to believe that there was some reason for it happening, or that there's another way to prevent it. They hope. They hope that the 1 in a million chance of something working will be them. They hope that there is a definitive reason why their lives were unjustly altered. And that hope is what keeps them going, and will never leave them. Or maybe they’re crazy. We’ll never really know.
Pandora sends her regards.
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