Wacko Right Wingers and Wacko Left Wingers Endangering Their Children and Society by Refusing Vaccinations

Imposing Your Ignorance on Your Children and Your Illness on Society – The Selfish Americans Attack Again

No American parent of young children today has any concept of the horror and tragedy of childhood diseases.  In the age before vaccinations and anti-biotics a childhood  disease could be a death sentence.  Today, because of vaccinations childhood diseases are largely avoided, sparing children their lives and parents unspeakable grief. 

That of course assumes that parents would see that their children are vaccinated.  Actually that seems silly, what kind of parent would not make certain their children are vaccinated, the vaccines are safe and effective.  But apparently there are some really bad people out there who also happen to be parents.

These local concentrations of unvaccinated children pose a growing risk to public health. For the most common shots, vaccination rates for America overall, and even California, are still above 90%, at or near the levels considered necessary to provide “herd immunity” for a population. But in places the rates have been falling for almost a decade. In many counties, towns and nursery schools—within Washington state, Oregon, Vermont and California, especially—vaccination rates are now far below the herd-immunity level.

And who are these rather despicable people?

In some pockets, such as the rural foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, they may belong to the conservative don’t-tread-on-me crowd that distrusts all government recommendations simply because they come from the government. In others, such as the liberal organic-food-and-yoga belt along the coast, parents may forswear vaccines because they see the shots as dangerous, and the diseases they protect against as mild.

And what is the impact of their behavior?

These local concentrations of unvaccinated children pose a growing risk to public health. For the most common shots, vaccination rates for America overall, and even California, are still above 90%, at or near the levels considered necessary to provide “herd immunity” for a population. But in places the rates have been falling for almost a decade. In many counties, towns and nursery schools—within Washington state, Oregon, Vermont and California, especially—vaccination rates are now far below the herd-immunity level.

This trend, predictably, is leading to the resurgence of diseases considered vanquished long ago. In 2010, for example, California had an outbreak of whooping cough, which at its height put 455 babies in hospital and killed ten of them. Elsewhere there have been outbreaks of measles.

So once again political and scientific ignorance is trumping common sense and concern for others.  As for the argument that one should not get their children vaccinated, well there is this.

The case against vaccination, by contrast, is not clear. One view seems to be that the diseases in question merely give you a rash and are a nuisance, whereas the vaccines will make your child autistic. That particular myth, still peddled on the internet, originated with Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, who published a paper in 1998 that suggested a link between the common MMR shot (against measles, mumps and rubella) and autism. The paper has since been entirely discredited, and Dr Wakefield censured.

And now we another example of the arrogance of ignorance.  And another example of how selfish people inflict and infect the rest of society.