Anti-vaxxers have been outright lying about COVID vaccines, and all of the others, so far as I know. That addlepated Kennedy manchild is one of the self-proclaimed leaders of the antivaxxers.
I know that the antivaxxers don't care about anyone else. They are intellectual babies, people who believe in freedom with no responsibilities or consequences. And you can bet the farm that they deny the reality that in states where people haven't been vaccinated for Covid have higher death rates.
The problem, of course, is that they themselves aren't footing the costs for their conspiracy-thory-based resistance to vaccines. When they or their kids go to the doctor, the walk-in clinic or the hospital because they've gotten sick from a communicable disease, the rest of us have to foot the cost. Whether its from higher medical insurance premiums or higher costs to the hospitals (which get reflected in insurance) or draining state Medicaid funds, we all pay for it.
And if polio returns to any extent and people start ending up in iron lungs again, we are all going to be paying for it.
Which is the basis of my objection: If you want to be stupid and run the risk of getting sick from communicable diseases, then the rest of us should not have to backstop you. If, it is found that you contracted a communicable disease that was preventable (or mitigatable) by inoculation and you didn't bother, then it should be the law that all of the costs should be recoverable from you, with a denial of bankruptcy or homestead laws as safe harbors.
Baby Kennedy can afford to be a medical moron. Can you?
H/T
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As I wrote to a vaxx denying in-law:
There was a time when disease regularly took children. Walk through any cemetery from the early 20th century and look at all the tiny childrens' tombstones. Diptheria, whooping cough, smallpox. measles, tetanus , typhoid, mumps, scarlet fever, ear infection that went very bad and invaded the skull. My great-grandfather was a homeopathic doctor in New Albany. He died of diabetes. My grandfather trained in Vienna in the best allopathic eye, ear, noe and throat medicine and surgery in the then world. He lost his youngest son to a bone infection over a month's time. My father had one of those bad ear infections as a kid....I have Grand-dad's gouge chisels which he would chisel out the rotten infected skull bone....and may father had a pocket behind his ear where that had been done.
I am sorry. By my lights, you might as well believe in a Flat Earth, deny gravity and drink ditch water, as deny the necessity and essentiality of vaccinations.
🙁
We must agree to disagree on this. We were heedless kids when the last pandemic of polio passed out of experience; our parents experienced terror for us, we did not. But disease is still ineluctably out there; however much we may deludedly think it's 20th century.
Disease and human physiology presents differently in all of us. Medicine is not a perfect, 100% effective without side effects. It's a imperfect tradeoff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2woBNxrDQA
-Doug in Sugar Pine
You keep using the word "preventable". You do not use the word "communicable". That is where the ethical issue comes in. My own view is that the State has a paramount interest in suppressing communicable diseases, that that suppression can only be accomplished by universal measures, and that the real subtext of exemptions -- formal or informal, on whatever grounds -- is "LOL nothing matters".
+1 Natural laws have no pity.
Frank, good point. Thank you. I will change it.
FWIW, I grew with kids crippled by polio. There was the Salk vaccine and then the Sabin oral vaccine. Polio comes back like shingles, but worse later in life.
Jon Jones: My mother was paralyzed by polio when I was a year old; I grew up taking care of her. I left out the beginning of that letter to my non-vaxxing in-law. Here is is:
Can you imagine how different my life would have been if a polio vaccine had been available for my mother? I grew up poorly socialized because I didn't play much with other kids, instead came home straight from school to tend to her. Dressed her, potted her, hoisted her in and out of bed, came at a dead run when she called, cleaned up her colostomy before the days of ostomony bags. I watched and loved her, her spirit, her guts, courage and love. Every. Day.
I was poorly socialized because of my health growing up. I got everything that was going around and then some mumps, measles chicken pox... SWMBO has some of deficiencies that were in your in mother now. Observations mostly and no equivalences. We each get handed a certain amount of time is up to us to do with it what we will.
I lost nearly all the hearing in one ear to measles. It could have easily been in both. I was just born too early. The measles vaccine was released not long after I had it. That harmless childhood disease wasn't harmless to me or to lots of other kids.
I grew up before all except the Polio vaccine. OK, there were some shots at the doc's as a kid too. But I came down with Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, God knows what else. And fortunately, I was unharmed by the diseases after I recuperated. I am all for vaccines now. COVID, of course, Shingles and Pneumonia too. Stuff I just don't need to get. Can't fathom not wanting vaccines. I was scared of shots too, but you can get past that. They can die for their conspiracies but don't get me sick on their way out.
w3ski
I do care as they communicate disease and while doing so
they give it an opportunity to morph into something else
possibly nastier. That means we have to avoid them like
the plague itself.
Like I said in the past, we have a responsibility to
ourselves and by doing so to others. By doing so, it
is for all our greater good.
I'm also old enough to have had measles, mumps,
Chicken pox, and the whole list of kids bugs that
ran rampant in the 50s and 60s.
But as soon as it was available the three shot Salk,
and later the oral Sabin. As a kid I'd seen iron lungs.
In the 1980s I had a boss that was partially handicapped
by polio (walked with cane). A few years later I would
see her using a wheel chair as the second pass damage to
her leg muscles has taken over.
Eck!
The only "good" thing is that those who fight science and vaccination may not be with us long. I find it hard to mourn those people.
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