How anti-vaxxers target grieving moms and turn them into crusaders

[Hekate]

9. My 6-month old granddaughter died of SIDS 10 years ago. The trauma was unspeakable...

But my daughter has been hooked into the anti-vaxxer movement and is now a crusader whose devotion to this cause is, sadly, fanatic. She is a local spokeswoman for the cause. The things she states as fact about California's efforts to vaccinate kids would curl your hair.

There is nothing I can do -- nothing. I try to talk about our family medical history -- which I can recite back for a century, before routine childhood vaccinations. No, no -- it's all due to vaccinations. (Part of that history involves one of my grandmother's sisters, who tragically never raised a living child. All her babies were born live, apparently healthy, and all died in infancy. There were no vaccines involved -- her generation was born in the 1880s for gods' sake.) The latest thing she threw at me, two days ago, was that she thinks I blame her for her child's death.

Grieving mothers are being victimized, and in their pain they go to war against science and against others.