That we have our own problems with the anti-vaccine crowd is obvious enough. Those who fail to understand what a bitch Mother Nature is, how she and evolution want to eat your children. Thus they decry vaccines as unnatural and wish to leave their children to the deaths that so many before them suffered:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]In the past, our ancestors were subjected to full-strength, undiluted, CFC-free, pure-organic, additive-free natural selection. The biggest recipients were young children, for which evolution had the greatest appetite of all. Those with the least useful mutations could look forward to a horrific death by starvation, predators, cannibalism, disease, drought, flash floods, drowning and much more besides. During an average 30 to 40 year human life span, mothers would produce eight to ten children only to see four to five of them die before reaching the age where they might pass their genes to the next generation.[/perfectpullquote]One of those that strode through the generations was polio. Something to which we do have an effective vaccine and thus parents today don’t have to suffer the agonies our grandparents did. Well, that is, as long as they’re not in Pakistan where there are idiots insisting that the polio vaccine is some plot to do something. Where they therefore kill those trying to save those children:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]After a nine-day hiatus, another person associated with polio vaccination work fell victim to the renewed wave of targeted attacks on those involved in protecting children against the crippling disease.[/perfectpullquote]Sigh.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Besides these incidents, two policemen were also murdered in Buner and Bannu districts, who were deployed to provided security to the polio teams. The incidents occurred after thousands of children were shifted to hospital after parents panicked due to negative propaganda against the polio drops. Doctors declared all the children healthy and stable.[/perfectpullquote]Agreed, Pakistan is not a Christian nation. Only some 2.5 million of the country’s 200 million so profess. Yet that J Christ guy, he’s revered as a prophet within Islam, even if not as the Son of God. And he had something to say about those who would harm and damage children. They would be better put into the ocean with a millstone around their necks for God really doesn’t like those who would harm children.
What makes this weird belief that the polio campaign is a plot against people so frustrating is that there is no animal reservoir of polio. If we can wipe it out among humans then it’s gone, along with the dodo and smallpox. And we’re so close too. There’s some small number of cases in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan, maintained by exactly these scaremongering campaigns against vaccination, and that’s about it. If we can just get these last areas fully vaccinated then we’re done. We’re on the verge of wiping out one of the terrors of childhood diseases. Yet there’s a violent campaign against our doing so.
Sigh.
If the remaining reservoirs are small enough won’t it just die out from killing its hosts?
Except it doesn’t kill most of the people it infects.
Give it a few more years of immigrants to the UK from Pakistan marrying their first cousins and we’ll have the same backwards thinking and re-emergence of the old killer diseases here too.
My school chemistry teacher was a survivor of polio caught in her childhood. A lovely lady, she had a leg pinned through the knee as a result of infirmity caused by the disease.
I’d actually feel that some of my taxes would be well-spent if they were used to wipe out polio—-there, I’ve said it. But I don’t think it’s worth another war with the Mahometans.
I’d therefore argue that we should stop wasting our money on trying to protect foreigners and just protect ourselves. We can do this at a reasonable cost.