To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate - Pick Yer Pundit

One of the anti-vaccine crowd the other day claimed that measles died out naturally, not because of vaccines. Said we never really did need vaccines, This Jenny McCarthy true-believer apparently doesn't watch the news anymore.  Measles never died out. We''re in the middle of an epidemic right now and whooping cough is back this year too. The epidemic is running loose in two places - illegal immigrant communities and upper class white liberal neighborhoods where hand-wringing moms, who watch Jenny McCarthy as their primary source of medical information, have opted not to vaccinate their kids.

I'm just wondering.  Even if some kids do react badly to vaccines, and I'm not saying they don't, do we stop giving vaccines at all (for those of you who are "against" vaccines) and roll the dice with childhood diseases? Do these people truly advocating that instead of vaccinating to prevent disease, that we turn "Big Pharma" (the conspiracy theorist's bugaboo in all this) loose to develops "other ways" to handle childhood diseases as some of them seem to be suggesting.

Or should we we go back to "natural" methods like gathering roots in the woods and boiling them in our pewter caldrons (the kind you buy in Diagon Alley). If you remember, that never worked out so well back when that was all we had.. Ask yourself, "Do we stop vaccinating in order to save a handful of kids from autism and go back to losing thousands of kids every year when the epidemics sweep through our schools." You guys have a short, short memory. I agree that everything that could be done, should be done and it is being done. There hasn't been thimeresol (with mercury in it) in children's vaccines since the 90s and the conspiracy crowd is still fluttering about it. There is some Thimeresol in flu vaccines, but those are ENTIRELY VOLUNTARY.

Also, remember this. Thanks to vaccines tens of thousands of children who might have died from so-called "childhood diseases" grew up to live and reproduce. Whatever genetic weaknesses they had that might have led them to succumb to a childhood disease is passed along to the next generation. I wonder if this spread of the propensity to die from a genetic disease is why some kids are now so compromised they are reacting even to the weakened disease in the vaccines?

So now you have a new problem. Do we take the eugenics approach advocated by early progressive socialists (and apparently by not so early progressive socialists) and let the "weak" be weeded out by nature's through disease to strengthen the human race? That seems to me what people are saying when they tell you childhood diseases aren't so bad and ought to run loose again. I wonder how many of those children who developed autism will survive the full up diseases?

Notice that the terrible reactions to vaccines being reported among a small group of kids didn't start happening till childhood disease epidemics stopped running through our schools every year thanks to vaccines. It sounds horrible to me to suggest we ought to let measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, diptheria and all the rest of the childhood diseases run loose again. We used to have to have ten kids per family in order to insure that even half of them survived childhood diseases and made it to adulthood. Many of the kids, culled from the human herd by Mother Nature, died from pneumonia and secondary infections. Given the nasty strains of those secondary infections that are running loose right now (think MRSA), are we going to be risking an even higher death rate once this new epidemic of childhood disease gets rolling.

One thing I have noticed, though is that the anti-vaccine rhetoric is strongest among political progressives and out there libertarians. Please beware my friends. Your compatriots have a history of not telling the entire truth. The point of my post is that who are you going to trust. It's funny how people who seem perfectly rational are willing to dismiss Dr. Carson as "in the medical profession" as though that taints him somehow.

I trust people in the medical profession waaaaaaaay more than I do the ragtag collection of witchdoctors and snake oil salesmen who are out there busily pumping up the anti-medical, anti-pharmacology hysteria.

I am very much against going back to the good old days before vaccines.