once they get diptheria, wooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, as adults they will be even more scared. also you dont want chickenpox as an adult either.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
390 points (96.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
38827 readers
499 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm still pissed my insurance won't cover the shingles vax. Took over my right side and hurt like hell for, uh, six years now.
we've been begging for the shingles vaccine for years now. they won't even let us pay out-of-pocket. we're five years "too young" despite both my wife and i having already had shingles.
Too young? My sister got shingles in highschool! Anyone can get it.
congrats child. you're at least ten years younger than me
I get you are pissed, but shingles generally is not contagious (exept for people who havent had chickenpox), nor dangerous (for healthy people), so i get that its pretty low on the priority lists.
Alltough if its lasted that long i would be worried why. Getting shingles usually is telltale sign for weakened immunity system, or mark off high stress and both of those are bad things.
load more comments
(1 replies)
What I really dislike is the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, because big pharma/nature best/other insane arguments, but then take them to an ER when they inevitably get that preventable disease. For fuck's sake, stay consistent. If you don't vaccinate, do not go to the hospital later.
Devil's Advocate: Being sick is an immediately visible problem; vaccinations... viruses are invisible and you don't see symtoms till its too late
Which is why we have decades of medical science that has gone to great lengths to discover these things. They can't be seen by the naked eye but they can be seen with a strong enough microscope. We know they exist and we know what they cause. We know how to prevent that from happening.
Yet these mouth breathing troglodytes have been conned into distrusting science on a fundamental level.
I'm only scared of vaccines because they're delivered via a needle. At this point I really shouldn't be acted of needles any more after injecting myself every week for ages, but for some reason I am 🤷♀️
I'm also a needle-weenie. I tell a different nurse each time and we joke about it -- despite getting like 9 shots in one day in Basic. Then I wince a bit as I get the shot, put my stereotypically plaid coat back on and off I go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust
There's been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.
Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.
Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.
But to no-sell skepticism as just "you're a little baby who is scared of needles" really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we're more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.
America doesn't just do this domestically. They have interfered in other nations public health perceptions as well. The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.
America doesn’t just do this domestically.
They do. It's just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from "Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead" to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.
The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.
Can't let the wrong kind of people benefit
There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.
A lot of it perpetrated by those very industries themselves. It's the natural consequence of letting every facet of societal motivation be dictated by profit maximization.
Like I said in another comment, I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest. And in that I would agree with them, if only they were able to articulate it.
I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.
A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.
But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic "don't let your kids eat jelly beans" or "do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain" hookum?
I think that's where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer's Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it's colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.
On the one end, there's supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.
load more comments
(1 replies)
my brother is a 45 , socially he acts like a 8 year old all the time. Of course he worships trumps and refuses to get vaccinated ( even telling my elderly mom to not get the flu and covid shot) . This is why I only see him one day out of the year, and that will turn to Zero days of any time when my mom dies and he has no reason to come over for one day a year.
What I think antivaxers can't articulate is that what they don't actually trust is the health care industry, not the science behind vaccines themselves.
Which would be a valid concern, but that is not what they are saying.
You can trust medical science yet don't trust the providers, history is rife with examples of big business endangering the public for higher profit margins.
They know that American healthcare providers in the past experimented on blacks and other PoC without telling them and they don’t want it done to them now that we’ve pushed to make everyone equal under the law.
This is why they’re so scared of equality as well - we’re all game for the unethical experimentation and exploitation of some of us aren’t in the protected class.
To really break the programming we need to get through that those lines are drawn on class, not on race as they appear, and that no class of divine human exists.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Being afraid of needles is fine though, right?
My mother has become, in her later years, a "well idk if they definitely cause autism but I did vaccinate all of you and I do have a kid with autism..." which like. whatever. I've been over talking to them for a while now anyway.
But when I was younger and getting vaccinated she always said,"you're gonna look at the wall in the other direction, it's gonna hurt for a few seconds then it'll be over and there's an ice cream place next door." And I have almost 0 medical anxiety, like I'll let new grads I'm precepting practice on me before I let them stick a real patient.
vs I remember when I was a swimming instructor in my early 20s sometimes a kid would start crying and their parent would come over to scream at them to behave and then it would take waaay longer to get their body to relax enough to float.
So while I'm sure it doesn't make or break every fear of needles or medical anxiety, I do think a LOT of it comes down to how the parent handles and ideally normalizes routine medical care.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I hope so. Irrational fears are really hard to control.
load more comments
(2 replies)
those blood test needles are the real scary shit
If you're an American, having deep seated mistrust and skepticism of the medical establishment, pharma, and government is 1000% justifiable. Every one of these institutions has exploited, abused, abandoned, and murdered people, all in the name of public health.
As a person who grew up in poverty, the idea of trusting doctors and medical authorities is just as ridiculous as trusting the police.
Assuming that social problems are the sum of individuals making dumb choices is an easy shortcut that not only eliminates the discomfort of thinking about the issue, but has the added benefit to implying that you're superior.
That mistrust erroneously extends to academia though, and they're more than happy to ignore the experts who aren't connected to industry
How is academia totally separate? I get how the opiate crisis is purely big Pharma exploiting people for profit, but the tuskeegee experiments were research. Isn't that medicine and academia?
load more comments
(1 replies)
i dont have a problem with vaccines, theyre great and im glad they help people
but, recieving one is absolutely terrifying to be, due to some needle related trauma, and generally causes me to pass out or vomit :/
load more comments
(6 replies)