alt Hacker NewsThat’s because the parent claim is known as the hygiene hypothesis and has been disproven by science, in common with anti vaccine claims. The immune system has not been shown to benefit from training, but has been shown to be damaged by illness.
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Maybe you should qualify 'anti-vaccine claims'. Throughout the history of vaccines which have saved countless lives, some people have died or suffered severe reactions linked to a vaccine. This is hardly surprising given our metabolic heterogeneity.
'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both extreme views have been on view recently and are indefensible.
The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children.'
I'm not sure how you would disprove the hygiene hypothesis, because it is a really weak claim and rejecting weak claims is really difficult.
The anti vaccine position makes a very strong claim, namely that vaccines will cause complications that are strong enough to justify not vaccinating children, which is obviously false since a lot of the diseases that are vaccinated against have actually killed children and the vaccines have dropped child mortality significantly and the complications that are supposed to be avoided by refraining from vaccines tend to be both rare and non life threatening.
You can't make the same argument with the hygiene hypothesis, because the claim is really weak. Nobody is saying that extreme hygiene will kill you. The argument is along the lines of "lack of exposure to environmental microbes, viruses or allergens may lead to an unprepared immune system that hasn't developed a wide variety of anti bodies or is more likely to develop allergies or autoimmune problems".
I'm not sure how I would be able to argue against this claim since it only takes one microbe, virus or allergen to make it true.
The context here isn't hand washing vs not hand washing, it's aggressive ozone + UV sterilisation vs regular hygiene.
Not to mention that the hygiene hypothesis has an even weaker version still, namely the "old friends hypothesis". It seems pretty weird to equivocate this to being against vaccines.