Fresh from Secaucus Fats's and Baby Paul's waffling on vaccines, come the news that the newly-minted junior senator from North Carolina thinks that the government is overreaching by requiring restaurant workers to wash their hands after using the bathroom.
Just fucking great. And when some kid who has leukemia or cystic fibrosis or some other condition that precludes them from being vaccinated contracts measles (or something else that we all thought was wiped out) because their yuppified, tinfoil-hat-wearing, mouth-breathing, scientifically-illiterate parents refused to have their own kids vaccinated, I propose that those parents get a free ticket to kick Chris Christie and Rand Paul in the balls on a monthly basis.
May the Almighty forbid that we have to deal with polio again. If we do, the ignorant anti-vaxxers will really be able to add broken bodies of children to their butcher's bills.
Besides the sad point of children getting sick because their parents are just fucking stupid, the very idea that a First World nation is subjecting itself to the scourge of preventable diseases because of large numbers of know-nothing parents and politicians is making this nation a laughingstock around the world.
As well we should be. For when it comes to vaccinations, large numbers of people in this country are as ignorant as the Taliban.
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8 comments:
Just curious. What penalty do you suggest for people who don't get an annual flu shot?
Sadly, the GOP aren't the only ones pushing the anti-vaxx agenda.
http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/01/why-prius-driving-composting-set-fears-vaccines?ref=hp
My wife's family is well educated and very liberal...and one of her cousins says that if we vaccinate our daughter we're committing child abuse. Fortunately my wife agrees with me, the kid will be getting ALL her shots once she's born. Especially as her birth mother didn't get the MMR vaccine before she was born-and is now mostly deaf, with a handful of other medical problems. (not because her birth mother was against it-it wasn't available then, but the example still holds.)
"What penalty do you suggest for people who don't get an annual flu shot?"
Liability for the cost of treating them, insurance be damned.
Well, maybe a second-world country. I think we gave up any claim to the "first-world" ranking years ago....
and the race downward accelerates.
@bearsense:
1st world = Western world incl. Japan, South Korea
2nd world = Warsaw Pact, Cuba, Vietnam, PRC ("communist" countries)
3rd world = all of the rest
Mark, the flu shot is always a crapshoot, for reasons beyond a comment. Not like the MMR vaccine.
I'm an old guy. One day, when I was in the fourth grade, our teacher announced that Audrey, one of my classmates, had fallen sick the week before, and very sad to say, she had died of polio. That was years before the Salk vaccine. That was also the year my friend Al got a "mild" cases of polio. He lived. But to this day (he is now 76) he has a pronounced limp and his left leg is withered.
Now we have vaccines. They keep people from dying. They keep people from blindness, deafness, paralysis, and misery.
That is one of the reasons why I personally favor taking idiots, of whatever political stripe who "don't believe' in science and who refuse to vaccinate their kids, and ripping their faces off.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
= My mother had polio in '48 when I was 1, my brother 5. The two of us were shuffled off to relatives and didn't see her again for a year, year and a half.
My mother said it was like having a tooth pulled....all over your body as the virus destroyed his nervous system. She had *courage*.
In her words:
http://www.sdean.net/molpolio.html
= My father was an eye surgeon, was in WWII, Africa and Italian, in an Evacuation Hospital, the closest thing to a MASH at the time. We took him to see the movie...he came out shaking his head, saying,'That's just the way it was, if anything crazier.'
Two things:
1) Damn betcha we got our shots and the Salk and Sabin immunizations
2) My father had had his training at Yale Med *just* as sulfa (the first of the wonder drugs) was coming in. Before them, people (and children) effing died...and medicine was pretty much limited to palliative and supportive measures to try to keep the sick alive until the immune system finally figured out how to fight or the disease ran its course. There was none of the current magic of run-the-test, give-the-drug, bang-the-disease-is-gone. And who cares about prevention, about public health, when there's magic to make the bad stuff go away. Sorry, there's no cure viruses except prevention and immuniztion.
My father said this: 90% of keeping a country healthy is public health, is in mandating environmental controls so the disease never starts. Wonder drugs and fancy expensive hospital stays are fighting the symptoms and mean, for basic preventable disease, that public health has failed....or idiots have failed public health.
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