When I was a wee lad I got the measles and I’ll never
forgive tWhe damn virus. As a result I didn’t get to the Saturday matinee that
week. Never mind the movie. It was the serial I missed. The Lone Ranger was
going to take off his mask. For my remaining days I’ve had to live with the uncertainty if he had a nose in the middle of his face like the rest of us.
Thirty years later my children were vaccinated assuring them
all of seeing the Lone Ranger’s nose. We now have a loud group of parents who
don’t care about their kids or other people’s kids missing such seminal moments.
All you guys in favor of measles get over there.
I’m trying hard to hold my tongue. I really don’t want to
call these folks misguided morons because many of them are university graduates
and otherwise enlightened. Some are even friends of mine. But something has
gone wrong with their brains.
There are among us those who conflate big pharma with
science and government with conspiracy. These are otherwise rational thinkers
who don’t know the difference between causation and correlation. If someone
gets hit by a run-a-way trolley car while taking a medication their unfortunate demise is
not a side-effect of the drug.
The case for autism caused by the MMR vaccine quickly fell
into disrepute. It was shown to be an elaborate fraud but that has not deterred
a large number of alarmed parents. When Mama and Papa get their hackles raised
they lose their smarts and regress to some reptilian mind state. A perceived threat to the child makes some folks act as if possessed by the Furies causing a temporary loss of good sense.
Many thoughtful people cannot live with unanswered
questions. Progressives join with trailer-trash smelling collusion among
politicians, corporations and science as if they’ve gotten together to produce
a vaccine heedless of consequences.
Let Nature take its course, they proclaim. Natural does not
confer harmlessness nor should the spread of microbes be left as is. Three
million is the estimated number of measles-deaths before the vaccine was
instituted in the late 60s. Natural products abound on store shelves gobbled up
by gullible consumers…as if opium, lead and arsenic were not also natural.
To the anti-vacs I say, get a grip. The world is not flat even
if Science says it is round, nor is climate change some government hoax. Give
your kids protection against the dreaded measles and consider the threat you pose to the community. Both Tonto and the Lone
Ranger, I’m sure, would agree.