When anti-vaxxers rail against vaccinations as poisonous, autism-inducing concoctions of death, they willfully ignore enormous past proven successes as well as thoroughly debunked junk science upon which the movement is largely based.
Diseases like, for example, cholera, polio, measles and whooping cough have all been relegated to the sidelines — in fact they would probably all be completely eradicated by now if not for this movement that has allowed these once nearly destroyed diseases to resurface.
Those diseases did not miraculously mostly disappear because people started eating broccoli and getting more exercise.
It's one thing for uneducated militants like the Taliban in Pakistan to target non-government organization health workers who are trying to help the children of that country. Although to be fair, they even sadly have a borderline legitimate excuse — the CIA fumbled big time when it ran a covert fake vaccination operation years ago in its efforts to obtain Osama bin Laden's family DNA. Now, any time an innocent nurse tries to administer a potentially life-saving vaccine to a child in that country, he or she could become the Taliban's next target.
But in countries where education — and access to information — should not be lacking, the extent to which some people convince themselves a natural, healthy lifestyle is enough to fight off all disease is rather staggering and immensely disconcerting.
Tell that to the 18 million people who died of the Spanish influenza almost 100 years ago. Or all the children who either died or ended up paralyzed courtesy of polio before that horrible virus was largely annihilated — how quickly some people seem to have forgotten about the iron lung.
The anti-vax movement was spawned largely during the late '90s after a study released by British surgeon Andrew Wakefield that was published in a medical journal claimed some kind of correlational link between the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
Despite the fact the paper has been thoroughly discredited over serious procedural errors as well as undisclosed financial conflicts of interest and ethical violations, leading the publication to retract it, the damage caused seems irreparable.
A lie apparently not only makes its way around the world before the truth gets its shoes on, but the falsehood also embeds itself firmly in the minds of many people so that even when the truth does start to catch up, it doesn't stand a chance.
Considering the seriousness of the bogus claim, numerous major studies were even conducted in an attempt to reproduce the findings released by Wakefield — who by the way lost his medical licence — but to no avail. No link has since been claimed between any vaccine and an increased likelihood of developing autism.
Yet some folks seem to prefer to get their professional medical advice from the likes of Jenny McCarthy, who gladly injects Botox to maintain a youthful look but continues to whip up unfounded fears about vaccines.
When members of society start to base their scientific opinions on whatever celebrities are spewing, we should all be concerned.
The most common side effect from getting a vaccine is a sore or stiff arm. If that means not dying from a preventable disease, sounds like a bargain.
