The Price of Denial
The BBC has the news version – Germany court orders measles sceptic to pay 100,000 euros
A German biologist who offered €100,000 (£71,350; $106,300) to anyone who could prove that measles is a virus has been ordered by a court to pay up.
Stefan Lanka, who believes the illness is psychosomatic, made the pledge four years ago on his website.
The reward was later claimed by German doctor David Barden, who gathered evidence from various medical studies. Mr Lanka dismissed the findings.
But the court in the town of Ravensburg ruled that the proof was sufficient.
The guy is supposedly a biologist, but believes that small children can convince themselves to have a measurably high temperature, break out with a spotty rash, and even die. As someone who has had the measles, along with my brothers, I can definitely guarantee that it wasn’t our idea.
So how do we get the Koch brothers into this Ravensburg court? 😈
4 comments
I was lucky enough to be born after the first vaccine became available, so I never had to suffer measles. I’m definitely glad of that, because one of my great-grandfathers ended up blind because of measles.
It was a week in a dark bedroom feeling miserable and sweating. Knowing that every other kid in the area was going through the same thing didn’t help. The room was kept dark because of the potential for blindness.
Uck. There are some things that would be better off as history. Unfortunately, vaccine denialists like this moron give an excuse for any other paranoid idiot out there who’s scared of needles, and thus we get the current situation with a worldwide measles outbreak. SIGH.
People just don’t get it. Some diseases are just endemic. They are part of the environment, and may not be detected because their hosts don’t become sick in an obvious manner. There are millions of ‘Typhoid Marys” out there carrying various diseases, like HIV and the Ebola viruses, that aren’t known until someone comes in contact with them and an epidemic starts.
We now have global travel, and people in other countries don’t have the same level of immunization as the US, so they may be sick when they arrive. That the current outbreak seems to have started at Disneyland is not surprising as it is a destination for people from around the world with their children.
The people who weren’t immunized are the ones that will catch and spread the disease. Immunization is a public health concern, not just an individual decision. If it is legal to quarantine people who have had contact with Ebola patients, it is certainly legal to require immunization.