I have on my left arm a peculiar, small scar, which I've carried from infancy. No, it's not the result of abuse, or falling down, or being bitten by a dog; in fact, I'm rather proud of this scar, because I was one of the last generations of American children to have it. It's the circular scar from a vaccination for a disease that's now extinct except for a few high-security lab storage vaults: smallpox.
Once, an art teacher in my school fell ill, and a substitute was teaching my class. This went on for several days, and then we learned the man had been put in an iron lung. A few days after that, I still remember the utter silence in the classroom when the substitute told us that the teacher had died. It was from polio. There was a time, just a few years before my birth, when this was far more common. Just about every school had at least one student with a useless arm or walked only with the aid of crutches because he had to drag a useless leg. If you don't want to take my word, try asking your grandparents, or anyone who grew up during that time. If polio didn't manage to kill you outright, it would still cripple you for life.
I wasn't so lucky with chicken pox; I grew up in the 1960s, and the vaccine for it only came out in 1995. Yes, I survived it; it's rare to die of chicken pox, still rarer if you're a child. Last year, however, I had my first bout with shingles, which I found unpleasant, disfiguring and painful. There wasn't much the doctor could do for me but prescribe some painkillers. I was lucky enough to not get the nastier, more permanent effects such as permanent nerve pain, facial paralysis, ear damage or even lesions inside the eye sockets (which makes me wince just thinking about it).
Just a few decades before my childhood, really, in the first part of the twentieth century, things were much worse. Diptheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio, measles, chicken pox, and even smallpox tore through America's children, killing hundreds of thousands, scarring or crippling the ones who survived. When one of these diseases reared its ugly head in a school district, school was stopped and everyone stayed home. Hard to do mass education, in that kind of environment!
It's hard for me to be patient with idiots who insist that this newfangled germ and virus theory of disease is all bunkum created by doctors as part of some vast conspiracy, that the real causes of these scourges were some vaguely defined "toxins" or dirtier homes. (Believe me, in the 1960s standards of cleanliness in homes were -- if anything -- stricter than most parents' homes today!) It's even harder for me to be patient with idiots who insist that back in the Good Old Days, before mass vaccinations and interracial dating and all, we lived longer, healthier lives -- the very FUCK we did! And when I see goddamned idiot parents bringing their kids to "pox parties" to swap measles and chickenpox around, insisting that even measles and whooping cough are minor childhood illnesses, it's hard for me to resist suggesting that they be declared unfit parents, have the kids forcibly taken from them and adopted by responsible people, and that we then have the stupid fucks sterilized so they won't breed again and endanger any more children. The only reason that these things are even
thinkable is that people have forgotten, with amazing speed, just how frightening and deadly these diseases can be. And because people are fucking idiots (and because some lawyers and "alternative medicine" practitioners are breathtakingly unscrupulous psychopaths). I don't like to even think what the future will be like if they have their way.
Yes, it's true that there was a rather strange and unfortunate court decision recently about vaccination.
Here's a nice, clear explanation in the New York Times of what really happened.
Anyway, having vented all that . . .
I just received an email notice from Columbia University Press, whose mailing list I'm on: the book
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search For a Cure by Paul A. Offit is available at 20 percent off. You'll probably need to get on their mailing list to be eligible for the discount, but if not, the code is PS08. (I probably shouldn't do that, but . . .)
It's about the claimed (and utterly false) link between autism and mercury in vaccines. I'm not in a headspace to produce a really good summary, so I'll quote from the website blurb:
In this book, Paul A. Offit, a national expert on vaccines, challenges the modern-day false prophets who have so egregiously misled the public and exposes the opportunism of the lawyers, journalists, celebrities, and politicians who support them. Offit recounts the history of autism research and the exploitation of this tragic condition by advocates and zealots. He considers the manipulation of science in the popular media and the courtroom, and he explores why society is susceptible to the bad science and risky therapies put forward by many antivaccination activists.In the interests of full disclosure, Offit is one of the co-creators of a new rotavirus vaccine. But really, if vaccines are a plot by doctors to make your children sicker so they can make more money off them -- wouldn't it make more sense to encourage the deadly diseases of the past to come back again? Believe me, that would generate
plenty of business -- not just for doctors and hospitals but for undertakers and mortuaries, and it would help thin out our overcrowded classrooms, too. Any takers? Apparently quite a lot of them!
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