Antivaxxers has made the episode of measles "Brady Bunch" a viral threat

"If you have to get sick," Marcia Brady bellowed. "Of course, I can not beat measles!" Marcia delivered the line in an episode of Brady's group broadcast in 1969. Fifty years later, it resonates in Facebook antivaxxer communities.

If you ignore the context of the sitcom, it will really look like an advertising slogan for the mid-century-inspired disease, the kind of thing that a feverish Don Draper might have come up with after his eighth Old Fashioned. So, of course, that's how antivaxxers take it.

Marcia's pro-measles platform has been a staple of the antivirus community for quite some time now, it's a popular meme, which means it's also a t-shirt. The scenes against measles are so common in the anti-vaccine forums that Maureen McCormick, who was playing Marcia, started up in NPR and asked to be excluded from this narrative. She is strangely outraged that strangers use her face on her own behalf without her permission, without asking her whether she believes in vaccines or not. The antivaxxers do not care.

For them, whether or not Maureen McCormick vaccinated her children, what she did is irrelevant, as is McCormicks' discomfort with becoming the face of measles. ("Boo hoo", read several comments on Facebook.) It's also the fact that the creator of Brady's groupSherwood Schwartz was also a known vaccinator for children. All those involved can advertise at any time their vaccination record and this will deter anyone from buying a t-shirt that informs the world that the family holding a sitcom has not succumbed to the measles on television. The same does not concern Marcia or any of the members of the Brady group: this is a 1969 installment.

For antivaxaxis, the episode is a time capsule dating back to a time when measles was still a common childhood disease. As it makes sense to wait and spread measles in a cheerful sitcom, it makes sense not to have to worry about measles outbreaks in the 1960s, so it's quite the same.

This is not necessarily a wrong reasoning. Sitcoms are a terrible source of medical advice, but they reflect the concerns and attitudes of their time. Clearly, your child catching measles was lower in the hierarchy of parental concerns at the time. But that's not because measles is not so bad. This is probably because parents in the 1960s spent their energy worrying about more serious diseases such as polio, smallpox and bubonic plague. Also, The adventures surrounded by miserable rash children sounds like a terrible TV show.

The problem is that when the antivaxeurs watch the episode of measles Brady's groupthey do not see a sitcom in which children will inevitably learn that getting infected with measles to avoid school was a bad decision. They saw an infomercial report about an acceptable plague that had just erupted half a century ago. Then they bring Braxton to Jaxon so that the boys cough in the face. In doing so, the parents antivaxaxeurs deliver their children to a medical life of the 1960s that never existed, it is a fiction drawn from fiction, swollen with nostalgia for the third hand and obstinate self-fulfilling prophecies. But screw up the facts, they make Marcia Measley again.

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