It’s truly one of the great existential questions of the 21st Century. Which is greater: antivaxxers stupidity or their heartlessness?
Antivaxxers latest attempt at “reasoning” involves viciously attacking a mother whose baby died of suffocation, claiming that it must have been a vaccine injury instead.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Anti-vaxxers demonstrate their derangement.[/pullquote]
As this article on Romper explains:
On the morning of July 3, Jordan DeRosier posted on Facebook that her infant son, Sloan Valor DeRosier, had unexpectedly died. She wrote a touching message …
One day later, DeRosier shared her son’s cause of death on Facebook. Not because she wanted to, but because she wanted her followers and those who commented on her post to know the correct circumstances that led to Sloan’s death. And vaccines were not to blame.
DeRosier bravely explained:
He was last laid down to bed with this blanket made by his great-great grandmother, and one other blanket, a grey one he had been attached to since birth. They took the grey one he had been found with his head in. He had pulled it through the crib rails somehow and gotten himself stuck in it. You never think it will happen to you. You never think it will be your baby. Please do not put your babies to bed with a blanket. Please. He was 7 months old, I thought because he was crawling, standing on his own, and climbing, that he would be fine with a blanket. This is the face of immense, unfathomable grief, the face of longing, of heartbreak, of self inflicted GUILT. I will NEVER stop feeling responsible. I will relive this for the rest of my life knowing EXACTLY what I could have done differently. Please learn from my world shattering mistake.
That’s why we counsel parents about safe sleep practices, including:
- Always put babies on their back to sleep for naps and at night…
- Keep babies near, but in their own crib …
- Don’t let baby sleep or nap in the same bed with anyone else … Another person, no matter how small, could roll over and smother the baby.
- Use firm mattress and a tight-fitting sheet in your baby’s crib…
- Don’t put toys, blankets, pillows, or bumper pads in the crib. These things could make it hard for your baby to breathe.
It couldn’t be clearer; blankets pose a suffocation hazard to babies. The mother put the baby to sleep with a blanket; the baby was found suffocated with his head trapped in the blanket. It’s tragically straightforward.
But not according to antivaxxers:
The grieving mother wrote:
To those who keep commenting and messaging trying to blame vaccines for our sons [sic] death- stop… I will not allow anyone to try and place blame where it does not belong.”
How did antivaxxers “reason” their way to blaming vaccines? In theIf fervid, conspiracy obsessed minds, the “logic” is obvious. A vaccinated baby died; the death must therefore have been caused by vaccines. Never mind that there was no temporal association with vaccination; never mind that the baby was trapped in the blanket; never mind that the baby died of suffocation, not fever or encephalopathy.
It’s yet another example of the breathtaking stupidity of antivaxxers, but it is also an example of their mind boggling heartlessness. How vicious do you have to be to write to a grieving mother in the wake of her baby’s death in order to promote your favorite conspiracy theory? Who does that? Only people who are desperate for validation of their stupidity.
No doubt the antivaxxers thought they were sharing their knowledge. In reality they were merely demonstrating their derangement.
