Antivaxers have long weaponized grieving mothers, just as cancer quacks weaponize the families of cancer patients with terminal disease. The reason? If you dare question their stories, you can be portrayed as heartless, "attacking" a massively sympathetic figure. 1/ https://twitter.com/BrandyZadrozny/status/1176480855893729280 …
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Of course, what skeptics do is not so much questioning the parents' stories per se. Rather, we question the inference made by the parents that vaccines caused their tragic loss. However, it's human nature to conflate one's story with one's interpretation of the story. 2/
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Antivaxers know this and take advantage of the human tendency of parents who suffer such a tragedy to need an explanation fur their loss and pain, and their tendency to view questioning the explanation they grasp onto with questioning theirs stories or even calling them liars. 3/
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Again, antivaxers know this and even encourage this. Few are the science advocates who have the intestinal fortitude to withstand being falsely portrayed as calling a grieving mother a liar. 4/
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Fewer still can stand their ground and still be viewed as empathetic when confronted by the grieving parent herself. None can do it without feeling acute distress at potentially increasing the pain of a parent who's lousy a child. 5/
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Antivaxers count on this and use it to silence questioning. Parents who have lost a child learn that their loss gives them power to silence or inhibit criticism. We are empathetic beings, and relatively few of us has ever experienced such a loss. 6/
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Moving on to a different SSPE t of this phenomenon, many of these stories of "death by vaccine" don't involve SIDS, but teens who died unexpectedly, such as Anna Morin. Virtually all of these antivax stories of teen deaths involve the HPV vaccine. 7/https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/how-not-to-report-about-vaccine-safety-issues-toronto-star-edition/ …
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Moving on to a different ASPECT of this phenomenon...
Damn, I thought I adequately proofread this Tweet thread.
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