We do not live in a time of plagues. Our children are healthy. We — as a world of nations — came together in a herculean, unselfish, effort to successfully eradicate Smallpox from the face of the earth through mandatory vaccinations even though, at times, those vaccinations caused death and illness in those who got shot or inadvertently exposed.
With wild success comes the failure of logical memory over the convenience of current emotional guessing where immediate individual needs take precedence over the greater goodness of the group. For those who know the perils of history and its infectious diseases that can wipe out a culture and condemn thousands of people to death by perishing — we cannot hold our eyes open long enough to keep them from weeping for the misguided parents that today claim childhood vaccines are bad for their kids and should be abolished:
SAN DIEGO — In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, and the other three were too young to receive vaccines. The parents who objected to their children being inoculated are among a small but growing number of vaccine skeptics in California and other states who take advantage of exemptions to laws requiring vaccinations for school-age children.
The exemptions have been growing since the early 1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public health officials and physicians find disturbing. Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots — the measles vaccine, for instance, is only 95 percent effective — and to those children too young to receive certain vaccines. Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.
Parents must not be allowed to pick-and-choose which vaccines their children will get or not — all children must be equally inoculated as mandated by a National Public Health policy — or the entire realm of childhood becomes susceptible to deadly consequences at the hands of a few misinformed, and many immoral, and malformed, parents:
“I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good,” said Sybil Carlson, whose 6-year-old son goes to school with several of the children hit by the measles outbreak here. The boy is immunized against some diseases but not measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis. “When I began to read about vaccines and how they work,” she said, “I saw medical studies, not given to use by the mainstream media, connecting them with neurological disorders, asthma and immunology.”
There you have it in a horrifying nutshell — the entire problem with the modern world today is mothers who think they know more than medical doctors because of their self-study and their pedestrian internet education that predictably leads them to their dangerous diagnosis of — “My child first.” “My child is exempted.” “My child is special.” “My child will not be sacrificed.”
The hard reality is children are sacrificed for the greater good every single day — and that is a sad fact that protects the rest of us. You should not have a child unless you are unfailingly willing to sacrifice its life for the well-being of the group. We are not one. We are the whole. Society cannot harbor selfish parents — and then be expected to protect their non-immunized children. To deny a child standard vaccinations is tantamount to child abuse. You aren’t protecting your child by denying a vaccine — you’re killing all the other children around your selfish kid.
We only need to turn our, unblinking, and dry, educated, eye to the current AIDS epidemic infecting the world — and bear uncomfortable witness for the ongoing fight to create a vaccine that heals instead of kills to see how vitally important mandatory vaccinations are to the public welfare:
The two-decade search for an AIDS vaccine is in crisis after two field tests of the most promising contender not only did not protect people from the virus but may actually have put them at increased risk of becoming infected. The results of the trials, which enrolled volunteers on four continents, have spurred intense scientific inquiry and unprecedented soul-searching as researchers try to make sense of what happened and assess whether they should have seen it coming.
Both field tests were halted last September, and seven other trials of similarly designed AIDS vaccines have either been stopped or put off indefinitely. Some may be modified and others canceled outright.
We live in a dangerous, effluent, virus-infecting universe of filth and unmitigated selfishness — and the gift of socialized medicine and its mandatory, national, program of a legally-enforced Public Health policy — is the jewel of our evolutionary progression towards the light and into a more vibrant citizenry that can concentrate on moving the whole of humanity forward into the horizon instead of backwards into a forlorn shoveling of dirt into mass graves.