A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Growing up in the Fifties, I noticed classmates disappearing for weeks and months. Steel braces supported the withered legs of many who returned. Some never returned. All had contracted polio, the devastating disease that put Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair.
So when the Salk polio vaccine became available, my mother, a registered nurse who had cared for polio victims imprisoned in iron lungs, wasted no time making sure my brothers and I were vaccinated, first with the Salk vaccine and later with the Sabin. All of us received smallpox vaccinations. If there was a vaccine, we received it. She knew how dangerous polio, diphtheria, and smallpox were. And she knew what a public health success pasteurization of milk was.
Young mothers today lack those memories. So do most of their mothers. Only their grandparents and great-grandparents remember life before Salk and Sabin. As the terror of those diseases fades in our collective memories, thanks to the successes of vaccines, fears of the diseases have been replaced by fears of the vaccines, which on rare occasion sicken and kill. That loss of societal memory, I think, is the primary factor behind the anti-vaccination movement that now endangers communities where the vaccination rate is no longer high enough to confer herd immunity on populations.
Today’s New York Times reports that measles is making a comeback because well meaning but wrong-headed parents refuse to vaccinate their children.
The anti-vaccine movement can largely be traced to a 1998 report in a medical journal that suggested a link between vaccines and autism but was later proved fraudulent and retracted. Today, the waves of parents who shun vaccines include some who still believe in the link and some, like the Amish, who have religious objections to vaccines. Then there is a particular subculture of largely wealthy and well-educated families, many living in palmy enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are trying to carve out “all-natural” lives for their children. [Links in original.]
Of the vaccination skeptics, the latter group, the wealthy and well-educated, perplexes me the most. If they really are well educated, they should know the history of vaccination and disease, and know that microbes such as the measles bug are far more dangerous to their children than the measles vaccine. But somehow they’ve convinced themselves that eating organic foods and drinking bacteria laden raw milk confer more protection on their children than vaccines of proven effectiveness and safety.
They believe they’re being good parents, but they’re putting their children in harm’s way — and their neighbors’ children, too. Their conduct is foolish, selfish, dangerous, and it should earn them not only society’s opprobrium, but also some kind of legal sanction.