I’d Like to Play a Game

…But I can’t. I can’t play a game with anti-vaccine people because Game Theory assumes that you’re dealing with rational players. When it comes to the people who peddle in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you’re not dealing with rational people. You’re dealing, for the most part, with some incredibly irrational individuals who believe any and all conspiracy theories put forth to them by the people they worship.

They’re kind of like a cult, or a loose federation of cults. They have one or two (or three) high priests in the forms of Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or Del Bigtree. Those three men could sacrifice a virgin at an altar streaming live on social media, and it’s a safe bet that their anti-vaccine followers would find a way to justify the ritual. “It had to be done to stop the vaccine holocaust,” they would probably say. And the people would swallow it up hook, line and sinker.

Look at how they see vaccine package inserts. Package inserts are legal documents required by regulatory agencies to accompany medications. When it comes to vaccines, the package inserts name the ingredients in the vaccines, how the vaccine works, when it should be administered, to whom it should be administered and what kinds of side-effects (if any) were seen during the clinical trials of the vaccination.

Mind you, anti-vaccine people claim that there have been no clinical trials of any of these vaccines. Then, when you point out that it’s in the package inserts — the very same goddamned inserts they want you to read because they contain the truth — they flip it around and say that the package inserts are full of lies. If your head is spinning, wait for it. There’s more.

A few weeks ago, some dude who is a hardcore anti-vaccine advocate/activist/loon physically assaulted a California State Senator. The dude has a following on social media, and he ran unsuccessfully for the senator’s seat. Anti-vaccine luminaries followed the dude and praised him. Ah, but the minute the dude gets violent, they all turned on him and started the conspiracy theory that the dude was in cahoots with the senator in order to make anti-vaccine people look violent and nutty.

Then, just last week, some woman woke up in the morning, went to the state capitol in Sacramento, sat in the gallery of the senate, reached down into her vagina, pulled out a menstrual cup that had blood in it and threw the damned thing on to the senate floor, striking several of the legislators. As she was detained by police, she stood there and screamed to whomever could listen that she did it for the dead babies that vaccines caused.

Well, that is what happened in reality. In nutty-land, she was not an anti-vaccine activist and no one had ever heard of her. She wasn’t there to protest vaccines, either. She was there to protest abortion. And what she threw at the senators was not blood, it was paint, a cup of fruit or nothing at all, depending on which anti-vaccine lunatic you’re listening to.

Of course, there is the grand delusion that anything bad that happens to a person after getting a vaccine is the direct result of the vaccine. Car accident? The vaccine did it. Blood clot when you’re morbidly obese, a smoker and on birth control, months after a vaccine? The vaccine did it. Stroke when you’re in your 90s, have had high blood pressure all your life and are on anticoagulants? The vaccine did it. Suffocated to death under the weight of your high-as-fuck mother? The vaccine did it. Trump? The vaccine did it. Hillary Clinton? The vaccine did it.

Don’t even get me started on health care people who decided that they are going to be anti-vaccine. When you spend years of your life studying the sciences, and then you decide to deny the evidence and make some money off of lies… That’s psychopathic. That’s someone who cannot be trusted to be licensed to take care of a dog, let alone a human being. (With all due respect to veterinarians who do take care of dogs.) These so-called physicians and nurses who decide to peddle anti-vaccine nonsense should not be licensed to practice anything even remotely related to caring for the health of people.

And that’s why, as much as I want to play games with anti-vaccine people and get them all riled up in order to have them see the error of their ways, I cannot. They’re not rational. They don’t play by the rules of society, let alone reality. They live in either Crosby’s Labyrinth or something eerily similar to it. Up is down. Left is right. What you are seeing is not what your eyes are witnessing but some gummed up version of reality put in front of you by people who control the world and do not allow a shred of truth to get out except through their websites, blogs and social media channels… Channels to which you can subscribe and donate your money since they are not being paid millions. (Not by pharma, anyway.)

So I’ll have to look to another theory that is not Game Theory in order to better understand these nuts and continue to fight them. Because you should not have a shred of doubt that I will fight them until I cannot fight them anymore. And, even then, even when I cannot fight them anymore, someone else will. We’ve been doing it since Jenner, and we’ll do it beyond the age of Offit.

Your move, mother Hubbards. Your move.