Geeky Bob

A friend of mine posted the following image from Twitter (with the actual names removed to protect the innocent):

I responded that I like to mess with people who are that scientifically illiterate by saying things like, "You realize that when you compare a woman's XX chromosomes to a man's XY chromosomes, there are 8 branches in a woman's DNA and only 7 for a man, which means that women have 12.5% more DNA than men, and that extra branch is where DNA stores all the building blocks for intelligence and logic, which is why most women are smarter than you."

Yeah, sure - that statement about DNA isn't scientifically accurate, but it doesn't matter - because whoever the illiterate idiot is, they've already proven that they're too dumb to know better.

I stumbled across the following post from an antivaxxer on social media, which I thought warranted a response:

"90% of the 'food' in grocery stores today didn't exist 90 years ago. Guess what else? 90% of the diseases we face today didn't either. Think about that."

If this antivaxxer was only referring to food allergies, then I think - in a few situations - that they might have have a point. However, with regard to diseases, those numbers aren't just wrong, and they're not just dishonest, they're a complete fabrication.

Over the past century the combined scientific efforts from every corner of the globe have managed to completely eradicate or significantly reduce the impact of Smallpox, Measles, Polio, Rinderpest, Dracunculiasis, Tetanus, Yellow Fever, Helminthiasis, Schistosomiasis, Malaria, Hookworm, Rubella, Onchocerciasis, Typhoid Fever, Trypanosomiasis, Leprosy, Lymphatic Filariasis, Chagas Disease, Chicken Pox, Diphtheria, Haemophilus Influenza, Whooping Cough (Pertussis), Pneumococcal Disease (Streptococcus Pneumoniae), Yaws, etc.

Look, I get it - some people distrust science because they don't bother to learn about it. For most antivaxxers, "science" is what goes on behind closed doors and makes billionaires out of some truly awful people. But the majority of virologists, immunologists, and biologists are obsessed with making the world a better place, and as a result less babies are dying in infancy, more children are living to adulthood, and more people are living longer lives than at any point in human history. To infer otherwise does a tremendous injustice to the thousands of people in the scientific community who sacrificed their lives and talents to ensure that humanity is alive and well today so that antivaxxers can berate and belittle science from their ivory towers of unearned and undeserved health.

UPDATE: This post is one of several that I had written that I later discovered had never been set to "public."

I like making fun of anti-vaxxers because they tend to be rather silly people who usually act on their uneducated emotions and staunchly refuse to listen to actual science; they're much like the whackos in the Flat Earth Society.

And with that in mind, the following video contains some actual facts about vaccines for anti-vaxxers to blissfully ignore as they continue their respective crusades toward reinstating the Dark Ages.

😄