A parable (sort of)
posted in Blogging, News, Science |Once upon a time, there was a great land called Acirema, ruled by scholars and politicians and wizards. For many years, there was were plagues upon the land that swept through on a regular basis, killing children and the elderly and infirm, and occasionally leaving the people that they attacked disabled–blind or deaf or having miscarriages or brain damage or inability to breathe or paralysis. The people kept on keeping on–they were sorrowful, but used to losing children at an early age, and tended to those who were damaged as best they could.
But the wizards of the country decided to join with other wizards around the world to study the plagues and see what they could do.
They learned that by using a magical potion of soap and water, they could fend off many diseases. They discovered that clean water and clean houses helped. For some diseases, like the grey marrow, they invented magical machines that helped those who were paralyzed walk, and helped those who could not breathe to breathe again. But that was after the fact, and the wizards delved deeper and studied harder, and soon discovered the little creatures that caused the plagues, and came up with magical potions called vakseens to keep the plagues from…er…plaguing the children.
The people rejoiced. No longer would their children die from the wheezles. No longer would they have to fear the summer months, when the grey marrow flourished. Now they didn’t have to worry about their older children being unable to have children of their own after having the lumps.
Before the wizards developed their magical potion, for instance, 5.7 million people around the world would die each year from the wheezles. Even in the magical country of Acirema (which was very advanced, and had the money to keep the water clean and educate people about the soap and water combination) before the potions saw thousands of children dying from the wheezles annually. But after the potions were developed and spread around, the wheezle creatures fled, and the number of children dying from the wheezles diminished to NONE each year, and on average only 50 or 60 cases were reported by the medical wizards each year.
The people, being people, soon stopped rejoicing, had their kids take the magical potions as a matter of course, and forgot that the wheezles (and the grey marrow and the lumps and the malign influence and the cough-alot) were actually killers. They got used to thinking of them as “childhood diseases” that were No Big Deal, just something you worked through if your kid caught it, because the wizards took care of any serious cases.
Life went on.
Children were born who had never even known someone who had one of the horrible plagues.
They grew up.
They started to have children of their own.
Some of those children had odd behaviors, where they turned away from others, and the wizards called this “self-turning”. This was very rare–twenty years prior to this story, only 5,000+ children in Acirema’s schools were diagnosed with self-turning by the wizards. But the number of children who had this issue kept growing, and by five years prior to this story, there were 118,000+ children in the schools who were self-turning.
The parents of these children were scared. The wizards were studying this problem, too, but the wizards weren’t finding answers fast enough. After all, they had worked miracles before! Surely they knew what was causing this horrible problem! Maybe…Maybe it was even something the wizards had done!
Some people began to spread the word that it was, indeed, something the wizards had done…and that something was the magical vakseen against the wheezles. The parents cried out, “Don’t use that horrible vakseen! It will give your children the self-turning! It has Bad Things in it, especially liquid silver!” The wizards studied this, and found no connection, but just in case, they took the liquid silver out of the vakseens. But the number of children who were self-turning did not decrease after the liquid silver was taken out of the vakseens. The parents, still scared, said there must be something else in the vakseens. The wizards, who knew about the need for children to get vakseens because of something called “herd protection” (if more than a certain percentage of the children were to get the vakseens, all children would be protected, because the horrible wheezle creatures wouldn’t be able to find hosts to grow in, but if less than that percentage got the vakseens, the wheezles would come back each year, bigger and stronger), kept protesting that children needed the vakseens.
But more people listened to the scared parents. And more people began to doubt the wizards. And in Brittannia, for instance, the percentage of children who got the vakseen went from 92% down to 80% over the course of 10 years, and the number of children who got the wheezles rose to 917 in 2007.
All of which leads us to today. Or at least, the past few weeks. A few weeks ago, a lady named Amanda Peet, who stars in the latest X-Files movie, caused a flap at Cookie Magazine by saying in an interview that she thought that people who don’t vaccinate are “parasites”. One of my regular blog stops, CrabMommy, said something similar when cheering Amanda Peet on.
Oh, the wails and gnashing of teeth! The cries of “tell me that when you’ve held your screaming, thrashing child down as they have a seizure!”! The uproar about the horrible, awful, nasty vaccines that cause autism caused Peet and CrabMommy to have to apologize. CrabMommy apologized in her own personal blog, as well. And I am left…aghast? Speechless? Angry? Frustrated?
Folks, this disease kills children. An estimated 242,000 children died from measles worldwide in 2006. Every year prior to the introduction of the MMR vaccine, children in the U.S. died from measles, mumps, rubella. Not just one or two. THOUSANDS. And after the introduction of the vaccine, these days, how many children DIE from these diseases in the U.S. today?
NONE.
Chew on that for a while.
(In more personal news, today–the day before OmegaGranny arrives–has been sunny and glorious. Isn’t that just the way of things?!)
