Mark Zuckerberg Gets Backlash For Vaccinating His Daughter

January 10, 2016 Posted by Nathaniel Hooper

Zuckerberg and his daughter, Max

A photo is worth a thousand words, or so it seems, as Mark Zuckerberg gets backlash for vaccinating his daughter and is accused of endorsing vaccination for money. The picture has sparked far too much controversy for just one snap that was likely blown out of proportions.

The Facebook owner recently snapped a picture with his 2 month-old daughter, Max, at the doctor’s office with the message “time for vaccines!”. While Zuckerberg likely didn’t meant for it to be a way to promote vaccination or poke at anti-vaccination supporters, it was interpreted that way nonetheless. Anti-vaxxers instantly jumped to criticize the new parent on his decisions.

It’s difficult to imagine that the message was anything other than a father immortalizing a moment with his young daughter. Some believe there was a more subtle message to it, and were quick to jump in, adding fuel to the flames of the popular debate.

Within hours of it being posted, the photo of Zuckerberg and Max received 650,000 likes and 20,000 comments from some of his 47.5 million followers on Facebook. While most were supportive and positive, there were several that lit the fuse and sparked controversy over the simple photograph. This ranged from criticism to outright accusations.

Numerous people questioned Zuckerberg’s decision on having his daughter vaccinated, citing the unhealthy toxins that will only hurt her later in life. They commented on the medicine as being the cause of autism or other life-crippling conditions. This is in spite of the fact that numerous studies have already stated that there is no link between vaccination and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Others even doubted the Facebook-owner’s research on the matter. They inquired if he even knew the dangers of having his child vaccinated… in spite of the fact that his wife, Priscilla, works as a pediatrician.

Some users went as far as accusing Zuckerberg for cashing in on endorsement money from pharmaceutical companies for promoting vaccines. Once again, this is in spite of the fact that the Harvard dropout’s net worth currently stands at around $40 billion.

The debate has sparked at the heel of numerous conflicts that have been ongoing in the past 10 years. Anti-vaxxers have flooded social media, discouraging people from getting their children vaccinated and stating that “herd immunity” does not exist. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has yet to find any scientific evidence to back their claims.

However, a good majority of posters commended Zuckerberg’s decision and praised him for being sensible enough to protect his child from diseases and, in turn, other children.

Image source: wennermedia.com

Gauragopala Dasa

Nonsense anti-vaccination lobby, millions are save because of vaccinations!!
- Marvin Zinn
  
  WRONG. My father refused to allow any vaccination on me. Other students who had vaccinations got worse measles, mumps, and chicken pox than I did. Since then I refuse flu shots, and have less flu then the general public who do. Yes, it is a good plan in some circumstances, but is publicized only for money.
  - ocerg1111
    
    Your beliefs are no better than Alex Jones conspiracy theories.
  - Nicolas Edwards
    
    One incidental story! Really, can’t wait till those around you get a slight case of flu and you die from it.
  - SantaBarbarian4Q2
    
    Marvin,
    you are simply wrong.
  - Bob McBobson
    
    Hey I’ve never died. Clearly my lifestyle has made me immortal! Awesome!
it me

Is it really backlash when the clowns in question are an irrational minority and not worth listening to?
- JEng
  
  I think it is an excuse for google news to show pictures of his baby on their front page.
Marvin Zinn

I never joined Facebook waste of time anyway, but this certainly drives me further from it.
- JEng
  
  the spyware is the issue – but Facebook must be run by something like the NSA and he is just the frontman. Just like Obamacare sucks but is actually about legally allowing the government to do things to your bank accounts even if you don’t owe money – that’s the hidden purpose of that law.
ocerg1111

We still have witless twits fighting vaccinating their children? How stupid are people planning on remaining? Waiting until one of your kids dies?
- Sonny Bono
  
  You do understand that most of the vaccinations are for eradicated viruses, right? More children are dying from the vaccinations than from the diseases being vaccinated against; or ending-up permanently disabled. If you want your kids vaccinated be my guest. Don’t force it onto other people.
  - Louisa Valentín
    
    And do you know HOW they remain eradicated? Use your brain.
    - Bob McBobson
      
      Exactly. We’ve seen a rise in cases from eradicated/nearly eradicated viruses ever since this cult of idiocy got a national voice.
  - Jim Mears
    
    Vaccines are not for eradicated diseases you complete ignoramus. Measles, mumps, rubella, and pertussis are alive and well. What the hell is wrong with you? Hepatitis, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Rotavirus, the list goes on. If there were a vaccine against ignorance, you would need 1,000 doses.
  - SantaBarbarian4Q2
    
    Sonny Bono,
    
    You expired after you skied into a tree. Please be quiet now and enjoy your long, long rest.
    
    As for vaccinations, they work, they’ve saved millions of lives and everyone should have their children vaccinated. There is no debate, except among the “uninformed internet mob”.
    - Sonny Bono
      
      That must be why most doctors don’t even know how vaccines are made. They recommend vaccines on the word of the AMA. Hundreds of actual medical doctors who understand have said vaccines don’t really work and are a health risk. Many children have died. Many have developed autism or other serious brain and nervous system defects. It’s funny that many prominent doctors who spoke out against vaccinations were murdered suddenly.
      
      Like I said, if you want your kids to get vaccinated, go for it. Don’t force anyone else to do anything. You probably consider yourself a “liberal,” when I’m actually more liberal than you, and I’m a libertarian. Liberals aren’t happy unless they’re telling other people what to do.
      - SantaBarbarian4Q2
        
        Yeah, that all makes sense in “your world”, except that Mark’s married to a doctor, I’m married to a doctor and I’m a research statistician who’s actually looked at the published research. There is nothing in any peer-reviewed published research to support anything you say.
        
        The world is far safer with vaccinations. That’s the simple fact of the matter… These are things that civilized people do, like not pooping in other’s water supplies, and protecting the next generation from horrible diseases by having them vaccinated. What you are suggesting is the moral equivalent of intentionally driving drunk. It’s stupid.
        
        And, yes, it’s ironic that the biggest morons on this topic tend to be “liberals”… most of these “pocket” outbreaks are in liberal enclaves like West LA and Marin County, not Utah.
        
        Please return to you eternal slumbers, as you have nothing cogent to contribute here.
      - Sonny Bono
        
        Eradicated… no danger
JEng

That is a very nice baby not freakish like that CG baby in Twilight (I was worried).

I don’t use Facebook but I think this very young man gets criticized too much in the media and Germans REALLY hate him. They don’t do anything else but they attack the Facebook building in Germany? that’s not justified and not believable. It’s about something else.

His Jewishness.
- ticklemepink
  
  It might be his invasion of privacy, but whatever.
  - JEng
    
    Facebook is actually Taiwanese Xanga and Asian Avenue and I have long believed that surveillance is in the actual parts subcontracted out to Taiwanese OEM.
    
    This feels like America Inc. I doubt Facebook would get so much support just as Taiwanese sponsored content.
    
    And all of you who use Facebook are okay with it. I am not on it but that hardly matters – it is not the only way to spy – maybe there is a pinhole camera behind the LED light on the roku.
    
    The point is that Facebook ascended flawlessly – there was no exact replica opening up right next door to DIng Tai Fung. Myspace was never intended to rise – you can always tell when the name is less euphonious.
    
    And I keep getting ads for smart luggage with embedded wifi and who knows what else. You can get memory cards that are wifi if your camera is not wifi capable – that means it is probably in the Jell-O!
    
    Spyware is People.
    
    🙂
Eric

But there very likely is a link between trauma (e.g. needle stabbing) and autism spectrum disorders.
- Nicolas Edwards
  
  There is definitely a link between stupidity and you!
  - Eric
    
    Why the deranged response? What fear is behind that?
    - Bob McBobson
      
      Perhaps fear of the stupid killing us all someday with their completely unscientific, bat guano insane theories with no evidence? Fear that someone as completely dumb as yourself exists in the gene pool and is somehow procreating? Fear for the children you are outright abusing by refusing to vaccinate? Fear for innocent children of others you expose to deadly viruses because of your insanity? Fear for the return of viruses that we thought eradicated but thanks to people like yourself have started to make a comeback?
- SantaBarbarian4Q2
  
  Eric, most research now points to the trend of older parenting (ie genetic damage in middle-aged first-time parents) being the most correlated to autism. Not vaccinations. Not needles.
  - Eric
    
    Hi SB (Carpenteria is lovely),
    Statements like the following puzzle me, in that the speaker does not seem to hear himself: “And so we give a lot less vaccine despite the fact that the number of vaccines, number of actual shots are higher, the amount of load, a vaccine load we give is much, much lower and still you see the autism rates have continued to go up.”
    
    You can copy that string, if you like, and use your browsers ‘find in page’ function at the following link to see who said it: http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1502/03/acd.01.html
    
    I think that your “not vaccinations” is more thoroughly studied than your “not needles.” I find the trauma-shock grossly mis-measured (or under-measured because it is not yet measurable). Autism may be early-onset ptsd. That the manifestation is indeterminately ‘post’ traumatic is why it escapes clinical observation (as with vets the worst manifestation, the entrenched nature, of the trauma comes sometime after the causal episode/s).
    - SantaBarbarian4Q2
      
      I’m stunned that the anti-vaxxers continue to cast about for reasons to blame the vaccine (Now it’s PTSD? I thought it was the “toxins”, before that it was the trace mercury…).
      
      The statistics simply don’t support these wild claims from the anti-vaxxer nutjobs. The rise of autism does correlate strongly with rising average age of the (male) parent. And the rising use of anti-depressants. etc etc. Yet, you don’t see the anti-vaxxers talking about banning Paxil (probably because they need the Paxil to get through the day…)…
      
      It’s grotesque and it arises from the strange ‘privileged pseudo-liberal occult’ places in West LA, Marin and “The City”. These are the same crazies who decry “chemical fertilizers” even though those technologies feed millions across Africa and South America.
      
      It’s all part of the Michael Pollan (not a scientist) and Malcolm Gladwell (definitely not a scientist) trend of cargo-cult-science that becomes popular in the mainstream, but leads people to really, really odd conclusions… Jenny McCarthy? She’s really, really not a scientist.
      - Eric
        
        Well, that is a post, just wrongly placed as a reply to mine. If mankind reached the end of science, I missed that news.
      - SantaBarbarian4Q2
        
        Hey, we’re talking about California here– a place where science is regularly run over roughshod by politics…
        
        A place where they call Teslas “green” even though they are powered by coal and natural gas.
        
        A place where they can predict heavy rains from El Nino, but yet are only prepared with those CalTrans “Caution! Area Flooded!”Signs
        
        A place where they spend a billion dollars building a solar plant in the wrong place, despite research showing it would fry thousands and thousands of birds.
        
        A place where they’ll mandate MTBE in gasoline, despite science showing it would pollute thousands of wells and poison millions
        
        And, yes, a place where they shun vaccinations for no apparent reason
        
        Make no mistake, science is dead in California– replaced by the “politics of the loudest voice”
      - Eric
        
        So it is a systems issue (nature is as nature does). If man were the conscious animal that it thinks it is we would not have plastic trash (we’d of stopped after seeing the first piece). So, let it go like water off a duck’s back (a natural systems approach).
      - SantaBarbarian4Q2
        
        Nah, it’s just human nature to substitute individual biases for the underlying, objective factual evidence. Whether the ‘climate deniers’ over in Montecito or ‘the Vaxxers’ in Marin County, the more money people have, the more they think their own perceptions trump reality.
        
        The guy driving the $125,000 Tesla (in the car pool lane, no less) is intellectually smart enough to know that 70% of the state’s electrical energy comes from coal, oil and natural gas… He feels better, thinking he’s “green”, even though it’s very easy to see where electricity comes from.
        
        Ditto the Vaxxers– a little bit of research will show that vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of lives, that they work and are statistically safe… yet, these nutjobs are convinced that vaccines ’cause’ autism.
        
        It’s nuts and it’s the scourge of the modern age… the internet makes us stupider.
      - Eric
        
        They’re kind of the same, both ideas that humans are getting something over on nature. But the power differential is untouchable.
johnrf

I hope he was sending a message to the anti-vaxers. They are putting our children at risk with their proud ignorance of science.
badforu

I wonder if his wife breast feed the baby? Do they really do whats best of the best for there child… or is just a show? Vaccine are scarry, and theres too much evidence that destroy children.
- Nicolas Edwards
  
  1,000 times more info shows it is better to vaccinate. Don’t be stupid.
John Sanderlin

Way too many people here, that are Jenny McCarthy wannabes. Sorry, if you don’t vaccinate your kids, it’s your problem people. Don’t be so stupid…