Auntie Vax
The genesis of this post occurred a few months ago, when I wanted very badly to drive over 900 kilometers to find a woman I’d never met and slap her sillier than she already was. I read an article about this woman who refused to get her newborn vaccinated. Her pediatrician, family doctor, head of the medical association, the director of the CDC, and the Surgeon-General of the United States of America, have all advised, urged, entreated, recommended, and implored her to protect her baby against the possibility of getting mumps, measles, rubella, polio, etc.; while she was not deaf to their pleas, she just couldn’t comply with their entreaties.
Why did she refuse? Was it religious grounds? No, it was basically stupidity.
Millions, perhaps even billions, of people have been inoculated against diseases ever since Edward Jenner made the connection between cowpox and smallpox. Arguably one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century was the final eradication of smallpox by the WHO. Who, by the way, recommend vaccination as a safe, effective, and low-cost method of disease prevention.
The primary reason this woman refused to have her baby vaccinated, was because Jenny McCarthy thinks it’s a bad idea. The same Jenny McCarthy who is best known for taking her clothes off for Hugh Hefner and posing nude in his magazine.
On the one hand we have multiple medical professionals, with decades of medical education, research, and experience urging her to get the baby protected from potentially fatal diseases. On the other we have, a celebrity(?). If Ms. McCarthy has a degree in medicine, virology, epidemiology, immunology, or any other related field it doesn’t show up on her Wikipedia page.
So many children in Canada and the U.S., have gone unvaccinated in recent years that our collective “herd immunity” is breaking down. We’re seeing outbreaks of diseases like measles at rates unseen since, well, vaccination became common. The side effects of these childhood diseases can be lethal.
This, I have to call her deranged, woman even admits that she thinks vaccinating her baby might be a good idea, but there are all those websites out there that claim vaccinations are responsible for everything from autism to demonic possession. So she can’t make up her mind what to do.
What I’d like her to do is: give the baby up to someone who can make an informed choice, go to a gynecologist and say `I want my tubes tied’, and stop being a bother. If she wants fact-based evidence that vaccinations work, all she has to do is look in a mirror. She, and I, are of a generation that was all immunised against MMR, polio, etc., and we turned out okay. Although I have to wonder if there is something to their fears after all; apparently after being vaccinated, she turned into an idiot.
Shimoniac Jones 
Well said! She’d have to have a mind, at least one in working order, to be able to make it up. 🙄
Unfortunately you can’t vaccinate for stupid. 😡
I had one child who had a serious reaction to the pertussis vaccine, which made me a little leery of vaccinating the next one. But other than that, my kids all had the recommended vaccinations, and they all turned out more or less normal (depending on which day it is).
I’m glad everything worked out. As for normal, that’s a setting on the washing machine. 😉
“The genesis of this post occurred a few months ago, when I wanted very badly to drive over 900 kilometers to find a woman I’d never met and slap her sillier than she already was. ”
Brilliant opening to an even more brilliant post.
Definitely worth the wait.
I feel something brewing. There may be another one in the not-too-distant future. 😀
“Was it religious grounds? No, it was basically stupidity.” ….. hmmmm, I’m sure there’s a distinction here but I think the difference may lie in murky waters.
The difference is that one can be stupid without necessarily being religious. Equally one can be religious without being stupid. All too often though, the two walk hand-in-hand. 😛