Source: Facebook
I happened across this graphic on the Facebook page of an anti-vaccination group called the Vaccine Information Network (VINE). The page propagates the twin falsehoods that a) vaccines don’t work and b) vaccines are linked to rising autism diagnosis rates and a purported epidemic of other conditions.
Now, no one has ever denied that severe vaccine reactions occur, but these are rare. And I certainly support the idea of acknowledging those who have been harmed by these reactions. But I do not support propaganda that vastly overstates the number of these injuries as part of a campaign to lower vaccination rates, and I most certainly don’t support propaganda that uses images of disabled people to do it.
Of course, the graphic on the VINE page does not only use images of disabled people for a cause that isn’t ours. No. It does much more. It uses images of disabled people to engender fear. It uses these images to portray disabled people as pitiful, frightening, dangerous, worthless, and without agency. It represents disabled people as diseased and broken. It uses the worst stereotypes of disability as tragedy and social burden and passive victimization. And it does this for the sake of its own agenda, without any consciousness at all of the potential for harm of such stigmatizing images.
Shame on you, VINE. Your ideas about vaccination potentially endanger the public health, and you dehumanize and demean disabled people in the process of propagating those ideas. Time to find yourself a new moral compass. The one you’re using just isn’t working.
© 2012 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg