Anti-vax mom says she gave out lollipops tainted with chickenpox for Halloween

[Demovictory9]

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/11/01/anti-vaxx-mom-chickenpox-lollipops-halloween/23851623/

Anti-vax mom says she gave out lollipops tainted with chickenpox for Halloween: 'We have the packaging down pat'

An anti-vaccination mother took to social media on Wednesday to share her decision to give out tainted lollipops for Halloween.

The Australian mother, who identifies herself online as Sarah Walker RN, shared in the private Facebook group "Stop Mandatory Vaccination" that her son, whose name has been redacted, contracted chickenpox and that she planned to "help" other children in the community by spreading the virus through candy.

"So my beautiful son [redacted] has the chickenpox at the moment and we've both decided to help others with natural immunity this Halloween!" Walker wrote. "We have the packaging open and closing down pat and can't wait to help others in our community."

Walker's message was screenshot and shared on Light for Riley, a page dedicated to protecting "babies & families from vaccine-preventable diseases" in honor of Riley Hughes, a baby boy who tragically died from whooping cough in March 2015.

"Have you ever seen something that instantaneously makes your skin crawl?" the post, written by Riley's father, Greg Hughes, reads.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. needs jail time to protect everyone else

[NurseJackie]

2. She's mentally ill. They all are... but she really drives it home.

[jberryhill]

52. There's a definite psychological phenomenon at work here

Are the origins of her beliefs really much different from people who read things by strangers on social media and reflexively believe they are true?

I mean, that’s how a lot of people get sucked into things like anti-vax or spreading social media hoaxes in general.

They’ll read a dramatic story on social media - just like this one - and not even question whether it might be a hoax.

[JesterCS]

3. Isn't that considered assault/battery? N/t

[Ms. Toad]

18. In most jurisdictions - yes.

At least from a tort (civil, not criminal) perspective.

[Haggis for Breakfast]

79. Biological terrorism.

[smirkymonkey]

4. What?!

How sick is that? What is wrong with her?

[DetlefK]

5. Yeah... No... That's domestic terrorism.

"You can't stop me, Batman! I'm poisoning the water-supply to improve mankind!"

[Initech]

6. How could there not have been multiple felonies committed in that story?

I hope that mom gets arrested and prosecuted to the maximum extent possible.

[CharleyDog]

30. if she is a nurse, she needs to lose her nursing license and privileges

and of course arrested for vile acts of product tampering, endangering the public, and assault, not to mention a violation of the public trust

[Initech]

42. Absolutely. This is truly beyond the pale.

And she definitely needs to be punished accordingly to teach a lesson to these anti-vaxxer scumbags.

[Major Nikon]

59. The hospital where she claimed to work reported she never worked there

My guess is she simply claimed to be an RN so her anti-vax nutbaggery would sound authoritative.

Another explanation is the entire story is an elaborate work of fiction.

[jberryhill]

50. There are multiple felonies in Jack and the Beanstalk too

But I wouldn’t be looking for any arrests resulting from it.

[Initech]

57. There's multiple felonies in Peanuts when you put it that way...

[jberryhill]

61. I never thought of that

For starters, that dog needs to be on a leash.

[Initech]

63. And Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown - that's assault!

Also Lucy practices psychiatry without a license.

[jberryhill]

65. I always wondered about Pigpen's parents

[hlthe2b]

7. Death from chickenpox occurs 1/60,000 cases. That may seem negligable, but pneumonia, encephalitis,

aseptic meningitis, Reye syndrome, and disseminated Strep infection are serious sequelae.

How would this moronic woman have felt if a child had died or suffered serious consequences?

I hope to hell they make an example of her and jail her for felony assault.

[TexasBushwhacker]

14. And a lifetime risk of getting shingles and all its complications n/t

[Aristus]

8. I'd like to hear the concern-trolls try to justify this insane horseshit.

"She just wants to raise awareness."

"She's protecting her community."

"This is a hoax by government propagandists in cahoots with Big Pharma."

Whatever, fuckheads...

[Initech]

11. There is no justification for this.

There are probably multiple felonies committed here and qs some have said is domestic terrorism.

[Mme. Defarge]

13. The first, and I believe only known case of bio-terrorism

in the U.S. happened in Wasco County Oregon in the 1980’s when members of the cult/commune of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh poisoned a salad bar in the town of Hood River in order to lower local voter turnout in an upcoming election. Many people became seriously ill as a result.

[EX500rider]

19. No, those wakos in Japan released Sarin I think in the subways. nt

[Mariana]

20. Sarin is a chemical weapon. nt.

[csziggy]

74. Mme. Defarge was talking about in the U.S., not world wide. nt

[Eugene]

78. Don't forget about Amerithrax.

September 2001.

[cwydro]

48. Never happened.

Come on now.

[cwydro]

36. I'm going to bet it never happened.

Silliness.

[jberryhill]

53. Justify which horseshit?

Justify the insane horseshit in the story?

Or justify uncritically spreading insane horseshit stories in general?

[customerserviceguy]

58. You won't get that from me

I'm in favor of hard time for this criminal.

[comradebillyboy]

9. So when will Bill Maher book her for his show?

[NCLefty]

15. I was thinking this.

[peggysue2]

10. This I sick

I mean mentally sick for any mother (any human being) to do this to other children. These dumbasses need to be penalized for their irresponsible and negligent behavior.

The whole story makes me want to gag!

[Mme. Defarge]

12. Assuming she herself has had chicken pox,

although it would be uncharitable to wish this for anyone, I cannot help thinking that justice would be served if she were to contract a debilitating case of shingles, preferably in the ophthalmic nerve. May all of her victims be spared this monstrous outcome suffered by so many chicken pox survivors.

[3catwoman3]

16. Her RN license should be revoked.

This is appalling.

[Flaleftist]

23. She needs a criminal charge for every single one given out.

Sentences to run consecutively.

[VOX]

17. Germ-warfare terrorism. Making kids unknowingly ingest potentially lethal substances.

There’s no punishment too severe for this kind of insanity. What’s next, anthrax? That would stop all childhood diseases for certain.

[JDC]

21. jail, loss of license, and a fine that is crippling.

handing out disease infected candy to children is surely a serious crime in any country in the world.

[Hekate]

22. It has to be asked: are we sure this is real and not an evil hoax? A bot, a troll?

Whether or no -- a very sick mind is at work.

If this woman exists, she needs some time in prison.

[Demovictory9]

24. good point. Not sure

[Hekate]

26. One of the things that soured me on FB forever was the news that mommy-groups ...

...have been infiltrated by Russian bots and trolls. This was part of the Cambridge Analytica et al. story: Russia asked what are wedge issues? How do we exploit them? One answer: Vaccination is a wedge issue; hammer it hard.

[cwydro]

25. Yeah, this is kind of out there.

If real, she needs to be put away.

Sounds fake to me though.

I mean, how do you infect a lollipop and then put it back in the wrapper? Makes no sense.

[womanofthehills]

28. Facebook is having lots of these lollipop stories lately ... mailing lollpops etc.

Very hard to catch chickenpox off of objects.

A lollipop is, according to experts, a terrible candidate for an infection vehicle. The varicella virus, which causes chicken pox, “is spread by airborne droplets, not saliva contact,” says Jeff Dimond, from the Centers for Disease Control. Someone sick needs to sneeze or cough or just breath on you, and you need to inhale the virus to give it a good chance at infection.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/29280/could-you-really-send-chicken-pox-through-mail-lollipop

[cwydro]

33. Too funny.

I read she doesn’t work where she said she did.

No doubt it’ll be debunked.

[jberryhill]

71. Actually there's no hospital by that name there

But the local children’s hospital denied it anyway.

[Drahthaardogs]

66. Chickenpox can spread via fomites

Smallpox cannot ( the blanket story is bullshit), but fomites are not generally good vectors of transmission. I doubt lollipops were used.

Fake news I suspect.

[Hekate]

68. Okay, you got me. What are fomites?

[Drahthaardogs]

69. Fomites is the scientific term for objects likely to carry infectuous

Material. The classic example is the story that smallpox were purposely spread to native Americans purposely through infected blankets.

There are a few cases of potential smallpox spread through infected laundry, but it's highly questionable and even if it did ocurr, very rare.

In this case, the lollipops would be a fomite. I call bullshit.

[jberryhill]

70. Little bugs that you find in Vietnamese soup

[jberryhill]

27. Amazing how these things are taken at face value

This is the kind of story where I’d want to do some digging before making up my mind whether it is likely true.

[Hekate]

31. I'm an old sceptic and believer in science, research, and sources

Some things just ping my bullshit meter. Suppose someone actually did such a thing: would they immediately announce their name and behavior to the world? That is just for starters.

[jberryhill]

40. Just silly

This was put out before Halloween in Australia just to ruin kids’ fun, and people gleefully join in spreading it.

We pretty much deserve to be victims of disinformation.

———

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/kids/police-investigating-after-mum-claims-to-infect-lollipops-with-sons-chickenpox-in-brisbane/news-story/c4e1bfc9e1e06b6bcaecfc1875b52b86

[cwydro]

35. It so completely sounds like a facebook story.

Do people WANT to believe this crap?

[jberryhill]

38. Well I don't have an opinion on it

But it’s impressive that people dive right in.

In a world of billions of people, then someone did the most breathtakingly weird thing today somewhere, and I’d bet If we had knowledge of whatever that thing is, it would top this story every damned day.

But this one takes a common Halloween trope - the contaminated candy - and ties it to a particularly disliked group of people, anti-vaxxers.

So it had the elements of classic “that group poisons the wells and harms children” rumors which are usually constructed around ethnic or religious lines, and uses an ideological divide instead.

That type of thing - e.g. “that group drinks the blood of children” always has legs.

——

On edit: I’ve done some more digging and this looks like bullshit

[cwydro]

44. Yep.

True dat.

[AllaN01Bear]

29. i hope this woman looses her r.n license .

[greatauntoftriplets]

32. She needs help.

[dawg day]

34. My kids were among the last to get chicken pox before the vaccine was approved.

Fortunately, they got it at the very same time, because of course they couldn't go to school or daycare, so I had to take off work for that week (and more-- about 10 days). I couldn't get any babysitting service to send a babysitter. I'm an adjunct college teacher, and that much time out of the classroom was very difficult to make up for -- I didn't get paid for classes I missed, plus my students of course didn't get the lessons. (I was told I could pay for a substitute, along with not getting paid. Life as an adjunct.) Like many low-wage workers, I could be fired for not showing up, and in fact, the next semester I wasn't assigned any classes.

there were no complications, but both kids were very sick and miserable and feverish and cried for the full week. The itch is really bad. Both ended up scarred by the pox, fortunately on their chests, not on their faces.

So it cost the family a lot of money, and it cost me another semester's teaching (they grudgingly put me back on the schedule the next summer because they didn't have enough teachers that term). The kids lost 10 days of school and had a lot of trouble catching up with their lessons. And they suffered a lot, and so did I because it's hard to see your kids crying in pain.

This used to be something that you couldn't prevent. You suffered through the week of measles (hoping the kids wouldn't end up blind from it like my father's cousin or mentally handicapped like my great uncle), and the week of mumps (hoping the boys wouldn't be sterilized by it), and the week of rubella (hoping you're not pregnant so that your baby won't be damaged), and the week of chicken pox, and the summers when whole towns would be worried about polio infection.

There wasn't anything you could do but suffer and hope for the best.
The idea that anyone-- any parent- would deliberately put children in danger of all that- well, you know, people my age remember. As soon as the vaccines came out, most of us immediately got our kids immunized. The generation of parents now were all immunized themselves, and don't have any memory of weeks and months and lives wasted to these childhood diseases. (MOST parents today are sensible and get their kids immunized, but these anti-vaxxers... they have the luxury of no memory, I guess, and of stupid stubborn blindness and selfishness.)

Unfortunately the law apparently can't put parents who neglect their children by refusing them to immunize them. But parents who deliberately expose other children to their infected kids? Jail.

[Hekate]

73. Same story here. I would have lost my job if my Mom hadn't come out to stay with me...

So my toddler daughter got it first, and grandma came out on the Greyhound to nurse her. No sooner had she returned home than my toddler son pointed to the "itchy-bite" on his tummy and I had to call her back.

Gaaah.

They had already had their MMR vaccines, and glad I was of it. As the oldest kid in my family I remember all the stuff Mom nursed us through, and it was no damn fun for any of us. I think there was one year we got everything, and I mean everything, and the worst affected was my baby sister, who was under a year old. Her immune system was really whacked for the rest of her childhood, and as far as I can tell it continues to this day.

Complications of these diseases affected your family -- when I was in high school I met a girl who had complications from mumps. She actually wasn't at the regular school with me, because she was blind and crippled.

I also remember the last polio epidemic -- the sheer terror of parents across the country. When the polio vaccine was made available, every parent in town lined up their children for the clinic.

I was never able to tell my rebellious daughter any of this history when she was young, and apparently it was not taught in school either. When her infant died of SIDS, somewhere along the way in her desperate search for reasons why she was told that vaccinations were the culprit. There is no possible conversation to be had between us on this subject.

[tavernier]

37. When I was a kid in the 40's,

parents purposely let their kids play with other kids with chicken pox to expose them. That had been done for years. Apparently little ones don’t get it as hard and then the have the immunity. Seriously. It was a pretty common thing to do.

[cwydro]

51. Dayum, when my sis and I had chicken pox, mom kept us inside.

I had German measles and felt like a leper. Even sis and Dad stayed away.

My neighbors had red measles, and they were kept inside. This was in the 60s, terrible that they did that in the 40s...never heard that before.

At any rate, my memory of chicken pox was that neither of us wanted to play at all. We were very, very sick with high fevers. Covered in the horrid blisters.

I was very young, but remember it well. Terribly ill. That horrifies me that anyone would send a sick child like that out to “play.”

[Hekate]

67. I really don't know if that's an urban legend or not. My mom was really upset ...

Last edited Sat Nov 2, 2019, 10:16 PM - Edit history (1)

...when she got a phone call the day after we went to a birthday party and found that one of the kids (I think she said something like, "that little devil" ) had broken out in pox the next morning and exposed all of us. That would have been about 1952-54.

I keep hearing the tale you're telling, but honestly, really? Like mothers didn't have enough else to do without all their kids getting sick at once -- or more likely, one after the other the way mine did?

[tavernier]

75. Yeah, they did, no urban legend,

at least not in our town. I suppose back then without a vaccine for a more controlled response, people did what they thought was best.

Just to be clear though, that wasn’t done with measles which was considered a much more serious disease.

[tavernier]

77. Article

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323728.php

Don’t misunderstand, This is nuts! Vaccinate your kids!!

[jberryhill]

39. Can we please stop just believing every piece of shit on the internet?

Someone you don’t know supposedly posted this to social media.

But wait - then, the social media post was screenshot and posted on some other website.

Then, it gets passed around the internet and someone puts it on a news site because, gosh, everyone is talking about it.

Can we just start developing the habit of thinking, “This just might be bullshit” as a starting point for stories with that sort of genealogy?

Yeah, an RN was going to think this would be effective, or even remotely legal, and proudly announce it to the world.

How f’ing gullible do we need to be?

It’s a goddamned hoax designed to fuck up a holiday for kids. Shame on people for spreading it.

——————

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/kids/police-investigating-after-mum-claims-to-infect-lollipops-with-sons-chickenpox-in-brisbane/news-story/c4e1bfc9e1e06b6bcaecfc1875b52b86

The woman’s Facebook name ends in RN — standing for registered nurse — with her description claiming she works as a staff nurse at the “Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane”.

The Royal Children’s Hospital is actually located in Melbourne and while there was a Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, it was renamed to Brisbane Children’s Hospital in 1943 before being changed back in 1967. The only children’s hospital in Brisbane now is called the Queensland Children’s Hospital, which was opened in 2014.

Queensland Health, which oversees the staffing at all of the state’s hospitals, was also quick to refute the woman’s claim.

Commenting directly on the viral Facebook post, a spokesperson from Children’s Health Queensland confirmed she was not a nurse — nor has she ever been.

[cwydro]

46. Aw, you're going to ruin everyone's fun!

Can’t believe how gullible people here can be.

[jberryhill]

47. And they don't even know I put oral polio vaccine in my Jolly Ranchers

I live around a lot of anti-vax parents, so I usually slip a couple of doses in the treats.

It evens the score.

We are so fucked this election. People believe any damned thing they read.

[cwydro]

49. Snerk!

[Dorian Gray]

41. If she's for real

and not an internet troll, she should go to jail.

[jberryhill]

45. That's quite the "if"

But look at all the outrage!

[backscatter712]

43. Goddammit, Karen.

Let me guess, she has that bleached-blonde bob hairdo, and she's screaming at a poor barista at Starbucks. She's demanding to see the manager because they put soy milk instead of almond milk in her double half-caff pumpkin-spice latte.

[Ilsa]

56. Who is Karen? nt

[Major Nikon]

62. ...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen

[Ilsa]

64. Okay, thanks. I have a

Cousin named Karen and she's the sweetest person I ever met.

[cwydro]

54. As others have pointed out, just the smallest amount of digging into this story shows it's shady.

Come on now people...y’all really believe this crap???

[jberryhill]

55. .

[cwydro]

60. Oh my.

That’s hilarious, and is just SO this place at times!

[Celerity]

72. I agree, as soon as I saw this it looked so dodgy

[applegrove]

76. Nuts. She belongs in prison.

[Laffy Kat]

80. If this really happened and one child dies or becomes impaired...

Due to encephalitis or strep, she will have blood on her hands.