I'm Right Again Dot ComA new commentary every Wednesday - February 18, 2015
VACCINATION
If you've already learned how Jeremy Wakefield, former British Surgeon and "Medical Researcher," with a deep financial interest in a fraudulent report, linked vaccinations in children to autism in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet; if you agree that children, other than infants, should be vaccinated to bring about immunity to measles, mumps and rubella, there is only one thing remaining for us to do: Google the wealth of information about this fraud and inform others. The Lancet has completely retracted the article and Wakefield was thoroughly discredited by the British Medical Council, their counterpart of our National Institute for Health.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination myth gained traction and is now as deeply ingrained as other cults. The believers are legion.
I add my picayune voice to the vast array of medical exerts who support vaccination because of the recent outbreak of measles resulting from a visit of one sick child to Disneyland. By February 1st, 102 cases radiating from that one sick child had been reported, and five of those infected were Disneyland employees. Before every person affected or liable to contract measles is located, some of them may die. Measles still kills 145,000 victims each year, most of whom were under age 5.
Infants are completely vulnerable, for their immune system has not sufficiently developed and cannot withstand vaccination.
I have a special interest: a great grandson of 6, is challenged with autism. His parent do not buy into the anti-vaccination myth. On the other hand, I know a couple with two children who refuse to be disabused of their ignorance.
In terms of it's ability to spread, measles is virulently airborne infectious and though not nearly as deadly as Ebola, it spreads more easily and rapidly, because it "hangs around" in the air. It persists on things that have been touched by the afflicted.
Also, if enough people opt out of vaccination, something important to society is lost: herd immunity. This phenomenon is scientific fact. Also is the knowledge that certain show-business types are helping spread the misinformation regarding vaccination—reinforced by the all-pervasive Internet and what masquerades as intelligence on the worldwide web.
Governor Christy of of New Jersey, said recently, "Parents need to have some measure of choice in these things." (His children are inoculated, by the way). Politicians often seek the middle ground when there is controversy, no matter the harm that doing nothing can cause. In reference to the topic, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul stated, "The state doesn't own your children." Certainly not, but it does require us to get the facts straight and do something about it before they are decimated by a plague.
One last question: What if the disease was smallpox? There were uncles whom I never knew. They died of smallpox when infants, long before I was born. Three other children born to my maternal grandparents were terribly scarred by smallpox in the same episode One of them was my mother. She hid the scars and deep pocks as best she could, but never could grow eyebrows. My mother's father could not afford sufficient liquor to satisfy his alcoholism and still be able to provide medical care for his children— at a time when a vaccine for the deadly disease had existed since Jenner developed it in 1791 and it was widely available in the United States at the time Mom and her brothers "caught" smallpox.
It is not preposterous to suppose that smallpox could somehow reappear. We do not know all of the laboratories where the live virus is preserved.
-Phil
Richardson, Observer and Storyteller Phil's
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