In a strange, ironic way, it is comforting to know that it isn’t just conservatives who are anti-science. That way we can work together to address the problem.
The other irony of vaccinations is that their effectiveness has led people to not appreciate them. I’m old enough to remember when childhood diseases were rampant, and vaccinations were a life saving miracle. They were so successful that they virtually wiped out many diseases. Which led to people not worrying about those diseases any more. Which led to an opening for those diseases to come back.
And if we aren’t careful, they will come back with a vengeance. Because they are now so uncommon there is little if any natural resistance to them any more.
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Oh, what an irony that would be — there’d be nobody left but the Boomers everyone loves to resent.
Funny, when a younger generation decides an older generation is spoiled and pampered and unfairly blessed, they assume the older generation had all the things the younger takes for granted, including freedom from not just measles, mums, chicken pox, and whooping cough, but also from polio — for which vaccines we Boomers were involuntary guinea pigs.
It seems some things need to be relearned almost every generation. This may be one of those things.
I had an aunt who contracted polio shortly before the vaccine became available. Spent much of her youth in the hospital or rehab, some of it in an iron lung. She made it to 70 but had a very tough life, needing a brace to walk and a severe back deformity. Hopefully, it doesn’t take a resurgence of that ugly disease here to finally wake people up, and that’s not the only one waiting in the wings.
Bi Partisan ignorance and denial on the same issue. Yes its come to this. Stuck in the middle again (humming the Steely Dan Tune)