Vax Facts Whacks… That Just Keeping Killing

 

Vax Facts Whacks… That Just Keeping Killing

And It Ain’t ‘Bout COVID No More

You might even say that one of the most significant aspects of misinformation accelerated by social media, the explosion of conspiracy theories, can be fatal for millions of followers. Medically speaking. Many believe that this medical toxicity was born in the earliest days of social media. “Confidence in childhood vaccination was shaken by the 1998 publication in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, of a notorious paper by Andrew Wakefield and other researchers asserting a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism.

“The research was eventually shown to be fraudulent. Wakefield eventually lost his medical license in Britain, but he has resurfaced in the U.S. as a leading anti-vaccination activist. Despite having been consistently refuted by research, the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism is continually cited by the anti-vaccination movement.” Michael Hiltzik, writing for the November 30th Los Angeles Times.

It's obvious, particularly to those of us who faced banner-carrying anti-vaxxers at those earliest COVID mass vaccination sites, that something much bigger was brewing. To millions of Americans, particularly those who harbored “deep state,” “Q-Anon” notions and beliefs that tracking devices were imbedded vaccines, suspicions of anything that emanated as government policy – soon associated with the MAGA movement – vaccinations of every kind are/were unnatural, dangerous and often an instrumentality of governmental control. The demonization – now manifest in the new GOP House leadership seeking to investigate an octogenarian public health civil servant (Dr. Anthony Fauci, now retired) for his leadership in the COVID vaccination effort – tells us how strong that lingering antivax spirit remains.

That vaccine skepticism was more prevalent among such Republicans produced measurable results. The November 15th Yale Insights noted that infections among those most likely to oppose COVID controls and vaccination requirements are significantly higher than those willing to accept medical reality: “New research from Yale SOM [School of Management] points to another factor that puts people at greater risk of dying from COVID-19: party affiliation. The study finds that excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. What’s more, the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced.” That notion translates to vaccines in general these days.

This growing COVID antivax movement opposes vaccinations of all kinds, even those we have routinely required of elementary students for well-over half a century. Parents, where such vaccinations are not mandatory, are increasingly opting out of routine measles, mumps and rubella inoculations for their children. What this aversion to preventative medicine means, not just for the unvaccinated children, is that diseases that were very much under control for decades are now resurfacing with epidemic consequences for us all.

Measles outbreaks around the world are now killing the unvaccinated. Hiltzik explains: “In the modern world and our modern society, there can be no excuse for an outbreak of measles. The disease can be lethal for young children, but they can be protected by a vaccination administered to 1-year-olds that is more than 93% effective.

“Yet America is once again facing a measles surge. In Columbus, Ohio, an outbreak in daycare centers and schools is now at 44 cases and has been spreading rapidly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts 55 cases nationwide this year, as of Nov. 24. That’s the highest total since 2019, following a pattern that points to an even larger outbreak in coming months…

“‘We’re on the brink of a collapse in public health because we’re seeing intentional efforts to play politics with people’s health,’ says Rekha Lakshmanan, strategy director for the Houston-based Immunization Partnership.

“Fifty-one bills related to vaccination mandates in schools and workplaces were enacted this year in 26 states, according to the National Council of State Legislatures… While some measures upheld or strengthened vaccination requirements, others barred mandates or loosened standards for non-medical exemptions. Such measures were signed into law in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Utah [notably red states].

“The anti-vaccination movement gained strength from the COVID pandemic, thanks to the politicization of the disease and the measures meant to contain its spread by former President Trump and his right-wing echo chamber.

“‘Under a flag of health or medical freedom, an outright defiance of masks and social distancing came to symbolize allegiance to President Trump,’ Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, has observed. Hotez is also dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.”

The problem is not just the further exposure of all of us to diseases we thought were at best marginal threats – when they are now raging across broad swaths of our population – but the fact that these diseases not only breed and grow but create the opportunity for increasingly vaccine resistant varieties of these ailments to develop and spread. I don’t know about you, but I am loathe to let conspiracy theorists put my health and the health of my family seriously at risk to support their misguided crusade against medical science under the false flag of “personal freedom.” Nature will not be voted down!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if viral contagion could smile and laugh, they would show these expressions at their aiders and abettors, this malignant antivax crowd.