All of this debate about childhood inoculations recently brings back memories from about 55 years ago. If there was a shot available I got it. My eldest brother had died of who knows what six years before I was born, so my mother wasn’t taking any chances.
Back then we even got shots at school for polio. They lined us up in the cafeteria and stuck all of us with the same old dull needle, but it was all right because we got ice cream afterwards. Some years later Dr. Sabin came out with polio vaccine on a sugar cube. This time they just said anyone who wanted it could get it for free at the local community center. Yep, I took that one too.
Nobody got more disturbed about small children catching a disease that could kill them than me. I don’t like to watch the 1940s movie Little Women because Margaret O’Brian dies after visiting a sick friend. This latest round of debate has me totally confused. One group will swear that children who got measles inoculations ended up dying or developing something terrible like autism. The other side swears that inoculated children caught the measles from uninoculated kids. That’s a lot of swearing going around, and it makes me nervous because I can’t decide which side is right. Maybe they’re both wrong or both right.
I have a sneaking suspicion that all the preservatives and chemicals our children ingest everyday might have an adverse reaction to all those serums and antibiotics doctors prescribe. My paranoid side whispers to me that corporations which buy elections for our representatives control what government eventually will decide which side is right. There’s a lot of money riding on that decision. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m just a guy who likes to go out on the street and tell stories to anybody who stops to listen.
I do have to chuckle a bit that we Americans were all in a dither every month or so about a disease that is killing everyone. Well, it usually doesn’t, and we have to look for a new disease to worry about. Be patient. By this time next month we’ll be biting our fingernails over another disease which we absolutely have no idea how to control.
Perhaps that is the real issue here. We do have the ability to address issues like poisoning our water supply, proper labelling for our factory processed food, and proper preventive health care for all our children, no matter what their parents have done to provide for them. Let’s stop the war between religion and science. It doesn’t get us anywhere.
Maybe we could follow the example of Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower who started free lunches for our poorest children. He discovered that many of the young men enlisting to fight in World War II were malnourished. He instigated the interstate highway system to provide easy and fast routes for the transfer of the properly nourished soldiers. Incidental to his initial reason for better highways was the boon to the transportation of goods around the country. By the way, Eisenhower oversaw the desegregation of schools and was the reason all of us kids got stuck by those dull needles.
Perhaps it’s too scary to discuss projects for the greater good of all citizens which eventually enhance the quality of the United States as a whole. It’s easier to worry about the disease of the month.