I have many times though to myself that many in the anti-vaccine community are not as educated as we are led to believe. They certainly don’t have a sense of mathematics, and their sense of history is probably just as bad. Take exhibit A:
This man wants us to believe that a world-renowned, highly praised, admired physician and vaccine inventor would be found guilty of crimes against humanity in the same fashion that members of the Nazi regime were found guilty of systematic murder of Jews and others in Europe sixty-some years ago. This anti-vaccine advocate wants us to ignore the mountains of evidence that show that the doctor’s invention has saved many lives. This jerk makes a mockery of the Holocaust and tarnishes the unmentionable deaths of millions, all because he doesn’t believe in vaccines. Well, either that or he wants the doctor dead. I can’t tell.
But this is only part of the story. This comment was in response to another anti-vaccine activist’s call to arms:
Click to enlarge
The woman who made this call to arms is, well, special. According to her postings on her blog, she is very angry at anything that has to do with vaccines. How angry? Angry enough to write this to win an argument:
“SHUT UP SETH! SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!”
Classy. But I digress…
According to someone who took the course earlier, an anti-vaccine kid showed up in the course discussion forum and was quickly banned after he tried to hijack the different comment threads with allegations of conspiracies and conflicts of interest. So one has to wonder what this woman’s followers, especially the one that equates saving children from vaccine-preventable diseases to the systematic murder of Jews and other “undesirables,” want to do to the academic discussion in that course. Do they want to contribute? Probably not.
But think about this for a second: The man in the Nazi comment writes to “those unfamiliar with” the doctor. What if someone really is unfamiliar with that doctor and takes this man at his word? I can only speculate as to what could happen, and none of those speculations end up in a positive light. Because you should have no doubt that they don’t write this in jest. They’re not “just kidding” in comparing him to the nazis. They’re dead serious. They really do think that way… And they really do want to cause havoc.
One more thing… What follows has some strong language, but it is worth posting without edits. These are the online rants of an anti-vaccine activist who doesn’t mince words about their perceived association between the Holocaust and vaccines. Click to enlarge the images:
This is the anti-vaccine camp. These are those who claim to advocate for our children.
The Poxes Blog 
Wow, just wow…are there no boundaries of behavior, that these anti-vaccine, anti-science cranks haven’t broken?
About ten years ago my husband and I and two friends drove from Vienna to Prague (one of Europe’s most beautiful cities). We set aside a day to visit the Josefov (the Jewish quarter/ghetto), to see with our own eyes the history of the thriving Jewish community before World War II…and to see the few beautiful synagogues that remain. At the end of our “tour” we entered a hall, with the names of the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Prague who died in Nazi concentration camps, all carved into the white marble walls.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Prague.html
I remember growing up in Brooklyn and having friends whose parents and grandparents who had numbers tattooed on their forearms…the few fortunate ones, who survived the Nazi camps.
Some people really do want to see the world burn. Many of them frequent some interesting anti-vaccine sites. Their rhetoric sends chills up my spine.