Sorry, can’t find any better sources for this.
The animator then asked Maher what the “downside” of “getting a vaccine” was, which caused the comedian to go on an anti-vax tirade.
“The fact that you the fact that you don’t even have a clue what’s the cost of getting a vaccine that you don’t know the answer to that. You completely want to shut your eyes to the fact that there are repercussions to all medical interventions, including a vaccine, all vaccines,” he ranted. “They come, they say side effects, just like every medication does. You can see it in the literature. They can’t write it on their back on the vaccine. So you have to dig them. And of course, there is a vaccine court because so many people have been injured.”
I grew up when polio was a scourge. A relative was an anti-vaxxer, and one of her children was not given the Salk vaccine. Her child lived his life in braces, and over his lifetime, literally had millions of dollars spent on trying to minimize the damage from that one ignorant choice. Their family was bankrupted, and the entire family lived in poverty from that point on, spending every penny that they could, trying to undo the damage. There is a true cost of not getting vaccinated, but double-blind meta study has not shown any cost tied to getting vaccinated for covid, for the general population.
Check for yourself.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36936964/
I’m only 46, so post-polio vaccine, but my mother’s boss had polio as a kid and wore leg braces and walked with two canes. Just heartbreaking. And all the people who suffer from long COVID when they could have gotten vaccinated may not even have learned their lesson.
I’m 38, but I have a much older friend who had polio as a child. I didn’t know that until a few years ago. He walks with a limp, but it never crossed my mind to ask why.
A few years ago he and I were talking about body identification for whatever reason. He said, “it wouldn’t be hard to identify my body because of this.” He lifted his pants, and I said, “oh I didn’t know you had a wooden leg.”
It wasn’t wooden. It was just skin over a bone. No muscle.
That’s when he told me he survived polio as a child.
Funny thing though, he’s anti vax when it comes to Covid and has been hospitalized because of it at least once, maybe twice. 🙃