Somali

There are many ways to combat antivaccine pseudoscience. Personally, I've chosen my favored methods, namely blogging, giving talks, and generally combatting pseudoscience on social media wherever I find it. That's not all I do (for example, I do have a couple of papers in the peer-reviewed medical literature designed to combat the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia), but it is where I put most of my effort. For one thing, I'm good at it. For another thing, it's fun. Also, it's something I can work into my busy schedule more easily. It even brings me a bit of notoriety now and then,…

I've written several posts about a tragic phenomenon in Minnesota. Specifically, there's been a major measles outbreak among the Somali immigrant community in the Minneapolis area, the largest group of Somali immigrants in the country. Actually, this outbreak is not the first outbreak among this community. There was another, smaller one in 2012. Both involved primarily children in the Somali immigrant community who were not vaccinated. The last recorded case of measles in Minnesota was on July 13 in a white child who was also unvaccinated, but officials need to wait at least 42 days (two full…

After yesterday's post about how antivaxers were utterly losing their mind about an ill-chosen idiom that appeared in a Boston Herald editorial last week. In it, the editor concluded by saying that how antivaxers have been preying on the Somali immigrant population in Minnesota, feeding them antivaccine misinformation that has resulted in two measles outbreaks, one in 2011 and one this year, which is up to 58 victims, a number that continues to climb, should be a "hanging offense." In my post, I emphasized the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the response of antivaxers, who took an offhand…

Over the last few years, I've been doing a recurring series that I like to refer to as The Annals of "I'm not antivaccine." Amazingly, it's already up to part 23. It's a series based on an oft-repeated antivaccine claim that is either a like or a delusion (sometimes both), namely the claim made by antivaccine activists ranging from Jenny McCarthy to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the latter of whom is best known for making such claims after likening "vaccine-induced autism" to the Holocaust. (Indeed, RFK, Jr. takes denial to a ridiculous extreme by proclaiming himself not just "pro-vaccine" but "…

Normally, I like to mix up my topics, but it's been one of those weeks where basically discussing the antivaccine movement has taken over. Sometimes when that happens, I just go with the flow. Besides, there really is one more story involving that antivaccine movement that I want to comment on. Remember last week, when the story of how the antivaccine movement had targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota, with a resultant plunge in MMR uptake among that population over the last decade. Completely unsurprisingly, given that MMR uptake among the Somalis fell from 92% to 42% in over a decade,…

Earlier this week, I took note of an ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota. This outbreak affects the large Somali immigrant community there, and the reason for the outbreak is simple. Over the last decade, uptake of the MMR vaccine has plunged dramatically in the American-born children of the Somali community, from 92% to 42%, far below the level necessary for herd immunity. The reason for the drop is that antivaccine fear mongering has taken hold in the community, thanks to American antivaxers who targeted the community and Andrew Wakefield himself, who's visited the community at least…

There are many harms attributable to the antivaccine movement and its promotion of antivaccine beliefs. Certainly, the harm those of us who have been combatting antivaccine misinformation fear is the return of vaccine-preventable diseases, which is something we've seen in the form of outbreaks, such as the Disneyland measles outbreak two years ago and, in my own state, pertussis outbreaks. The Disneyland outbreak was a wake-up call to California legislators, who in its wake passed SB 277, a law that eliminated personal belief exemptions (PBEs) to school vaccine requirements. Now, only medical…