Who did not take her Vaccine
She got real sick
This foolish chick
Thus ended an anti-vax X-gene.
(written by Russell Hanson -- Feb 3, 2015 1:19 pm)
I had all the childhood diseases and each took a week or so of misery to get over them. I would not wish that on anyone. A small percentage of folks who get a vaccine have a reaction. A larger percentage of folks who get the disease have serious complications from the disease itself.
If you don't vaccinate your children or yourself, then, like the girl of our poems, it is likely you are doing the world a favor and helping natural selection along by weeding out daft genes.
Those of us who remember polio and small pox survivors understand how wonderful vaccines are. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine was a true hero.
As a scientist most of my life, I am bothered by the nonsense that is embraced, too often, by people who should know better. There seems to be an automatic response to anything that isn't "natural."
Sometimes I wonder if the folks who resist anything new coming out from the science world are really no different than the flat earthers, who clung to what they knew was true in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.
Maybe the US will divide into two groups--the "naturalists" who revert to an average lifespan of 38, the life expectancy of 1850, before germ theory and modern medicine and another group that lives twice as long following the guidelines of evidence based medicine.
This is probably the best argument that science is not killing us, the idea that we live much longer and those years are ones of more functionality. Think a little about who you trust the next time some one tells you to skip a vaccine.
