Childhood Vaccination
It’s an underlying theme of America today: “freedom” versus “the public good”. The most obvious example is in our ongoing public health crisis about gun death. One side correctly points out the Second Amendment. It states: “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” They want to end the conversation right there. (Of course, there’s the “magic …”, the horizontal ellipsis, implying that the amendment said more. And it does. “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”, implies that regulation and militia somehow temper “the right of the people”.)
But this is not an argument about guns today. It’s about an even more important public health issue, childhood vaccination.
Iron Lung
When I was a kid, back in the “dark old days” of the 1950’s and 60’s, we all ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases. I had the mumps, measles, and scarlet fever. Somehow I missed chicken pox, but that caught up with me in my early thirties. There were no vaccines for those diseases then, and for most kids, it was a blip in a normal life. But for some it was life altering, even life ending. We all read about Helen Keller, blinded and deafened by childhood disease. So while we “knew” we were likely to get sick, we (and our parents) could only hope we would be okay.
The great threat to us was polio, the “summer-time” disease. Some recovered from it, some were paralyzed or placed in “iron lungs”, and some died. Our family’s luck was right down the street from our home in Cincinnati. Albert Sabin, who developed the oral vaccine, lived a couple of blocks away. So while some of my sisters friends risked polio just a few years earlier, by the time I was at risk, I simply had to drink a cherry syrup, and be protected.
Eradication
And, since we travelled back to England to visit Mom’s family, we were also required to get smallpox vaccinations. I still have the dime-sized scar on my left arm, the mark of “protection”. Smallpox vaccinations were so successful that the disease was eradicated worldwide in 1980. The scrouge of mankind for centuries, killing and scarring hundreds of millions without regard to status or financial standing, was wiped out, and no longer a risk.
Smallpox spread from one human to another. It took a worldwide program of vaccination to disrupt the cycle of transmission. Once everyone was vaccinated (literally everyone) then there were no “transmitters” left, and the disease ended.
Weighing the Risks
It might sound hyperbolic, but getting a smallpox vaccination wasn’t just protecting yourself, it was protecting the entire human race. And it worked so well, that kids today don’t even know what the “scar” looks like, or what it was for.
Today smallpox is “just” history. And my generations gauntlet; measles, chicken pox, mumps, scarlet fever, rubella, whooping cough and the rest, are generally avoidable. There are vaccines that can provide wide protection from all of those, and more. In being vaccinated, children get personally protected. But they also protect other children whose conditions do not allow them to receive the medications. If no one in a class gets measles, then, no one in the class risks measles.
The Public Good
There are risks in any medical procedure. And it’s easy today for parents to get “scared away” from vaccination. In our online world, it takes only a few keystrokes to find horror stories of measles (actually MMR) vaccine reaction. Oddly, it difficult to find a reputable “scientific” site warning of those reactions. Instead, it’s someone’s blog, or opinion on Reddit, or some other personal account. Oh, and the law firms who will take your case of “for free” to sue if there is a vaccine reaction. (Free really means contingency fee based on collecting a settlement).
What does the “public good” require? It requires that many assume the tiny risk of vaccine reaction, in order to protect all from the much greater risks of the diseases themselves. It is the public duty, that our internet “informed” society is struggling to uphold. And, it doesn’t help that the worm-damaged brain of the Secretary of Health and Human Services feeds the disinformation.
It took a vaccine to get our Nation back to work from the Covid pandemic. That vaccination, and the, infamous “mask mandates”, helped us avoid the worst of Covid. In fact, it’s estimated that if everyone had followed the mandates, instead of taking “political stands” against them, another 220,000 Americans would have survived (NIH). Their position was based on “Freedom”, but without regard for the public good.
To put it bluntly, some Americans were not only foolish, but selfish. And they are now the ones running our public health systems today.
