Honestly, the only reason this antivax BS gets any traction with the vast majority of folks is that we have lost the memory of just how horrible these diseases really are. Prior to vaccination, death in childhood from vaccine-preventable (now) illness was so routine it barely was worth noting, unless it was your own child. I cannot even begin to tell you how often I hear “I’ve never heard of anyone getting (measles, diphtheria, tetanus, smallpox, polio, etc) so why should I get my kid vaccinated for them?” You have never heard of it because vaccines work!
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See also: right-wing populism. The Venn diagram of anti-vaxxers and fascists has significant overlap, of course (although there are a lot of crunchy left-leaning “wellness” idiots who also fall for this woo – unfortunately ones with money to travel abroad).
People my parents’ age and older (Silents, Boomers, Greatests, etc.) generally regarded Jonas Salk as a towering champion of science who vanquished a monster that put people they knew into leg braces and iron lungs. I hate to think how he’s seen by some Millenials these days, assuming they know the name at all.
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Time for the US and UK to go down the Australian route of no vaccinations, no school.
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Too much of that is left to the individual states. WV, MS and CA are (I think) the only states that do not allow “exemptions by choice” and require actual medical reason to not vaccinate.
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You ain’t kidding; from wikipedia,
Author Jon Cohen noted, “Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public’s eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board, and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer. Scientists and journalists who regularly dealt with Salk would come to see him in more human terms, but many still initially approached him with the same drop-jawed wonder, as though some of the stardust might rub off.”[45]
(though he didn’t exactly revel in the new-found fame!)
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Well, what is it they say about the price of freedom?
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Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Goodnight
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Salk, and Sabin (the inventor of the oral polio vaccine) should be two of the greatest heroes in the World. Not only did they give us the tools to wipe out a crippling and deadly disease, but they both chose to waive patents on their creations.
When Ed Murrow asked Salk, “Who owns this patent?”, he replied, “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Some of the Covid vaccine makers could have learned a lot from these incredible scientists.
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Measles can also cause blindness. My vision was preternaturally sharp until I had hard measles in Kindergarten. While I was sick, any light at all made my eyes hurt to the point of tears.
I was vaccinated.
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The scientists involved in the actual discovery knew all about Salk and Sabin, and Katalin Kariko especially struggled in a low paying gig doing work others said was impossible, for the good of all mankind. It’s more the vaccine manufacturers who have less of a charitable streak.
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Nowadays Marge would haul him in front of some committee to yell at him.
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Until they have an anti-stupid vaccine…
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This is exactly why vitamin A supplementation is recommended for measles treatment. (Why, yes, I have been brushing up on this for some odd reason. Why do you ask?)
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Dunno whether that was mentioned in 1971 or '72 when I was sick. It was a long time ago and I was V badly off.
I remember very little, other than mom’s freaking TF out when I got up one morning, and saying, “Oh no! You’ve got measles!” I looked down at my hands, and my fingers looked like little raw sausages b/c they were so en-rash’d; needing a completely dark room & the eye pain; and gen’ly feeling like a pile of garbage. It was horrible.
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There are sadly a lot of libs who don’t vaccinate their children, too.
Not too long ago my wife got a consult for Query Diptheria in an unvaccinated person. It took a while to even figure out how to order testing as there was only one confirmed case in our system since the 90s!
It is just soo hard to understand the twisted logic that decides: If no one I know had the disease, public health is obviously not helping, therefore vaccines are a scam. If these people were just harming themselves it would be one thing, but they are hurting kids, the public, and our medical system capacity.
It is so frustrating…
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While that is not exactly wrong, the left-wing crunchy granola types who did not vaccinate did so out of a mistrust of pharma, not entirely unearned. The right-wing made it a political position, started throwing threats and violence at scientists and doctors, and went to a “if you vaccinate, you are not one of us” sort of position. This is a very different thing. I have been fighting in the vaccine wars for decades, and what we are seeing now is so very very different from what we saw 10, 20 years ago. The numbers are not even close at this point.
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I don’t disagree about their reasons, but they remain potential vectors. Woo and medical pseudo science thrive on both sides of the political aisle for different reasons, but people suffer as a result.
I’m the registrar for my daughter’s preschool, and one of my responsibilities is collecting and reporting vaccine information for the state. I know what kind of parents are availing themselves of our state’s shockingly lenient non-medical exceptions.
Pharmaceutical companies have a lot to answer for, but vaccines have been shown safe time and again. I’ve been following this issue since long before COVID, which only made the problem worse. Wherever there is misinformation about vaccines or science denial, it needs to be called out, because lives are on the line. No matter how uncomfortable and complicated the narrative.
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Are we going to find a shrine to Nurgle in these guys houses?
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