Vaccinating children against communicable disease is the single most cost-effective thing we can do to improve Americans' health and save lives.
Some people don't vaccinate their kids.
The national argument over funding Medicaid brings attention to the cost-effectiveness of health care. What really works to make people healthier or save lives?
Childhood vaccinations.
I encountered this data on the same day that oregonlive.com, the 21st century version of Oregon's flagship newspaper, The Oregonian, carried a story revealing the data from the Oregon Health Authority on childhood vaccination rates in Oregon. It lists and maps every school. The information is searchable by county and by manipulating the map. Click
Oregon law requires school children to be vaccinated. The law allows people to get an exception to that requirement if necessary for medical or religious reasons. The trend line of vaccinations is down, and is now widely below the presumed "herd immunity" level. The herd does not make one immune; immunity is a misleading term. The rarity of the disease in an immunized herd means that one is unlikely to encounter the pathogen. One isn't immune. One just doesn't happen to catch it.
Traditionally vaccination refusal had been left-coded, with very few people declining vaccination based on a post-hippie, natural foods, natural herbs and alternative medicine, anti-establishment, back-to-simplicity orientation. Leftist home schoolers. Raw milk drinkers. Technology-avoiders. People who are very suspicious of politics, especially the major political parties.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made sense to that group. He is now a bridge to right-coded vaccination refusers, and he makes sense to them, too. Again, they are anti-establishment, home-schooling, anti-drug-company, pro-natural herbs and alternative medicine, suspicious of health "experts," and opposed to compulsion. They have a lot in common with left-coded vaccination opponents.
They would be distinguished from left-oriented vaccination refusers by the bumper strips on their car (Trump vs. "Coexist") and which school curriculum they choose, a Christian one with strict discipline or a Montessori or student-directed one emphasizing natural curiosity, self-expression, and independent exploration.
The Oregon Health Authority list shows that schools with large broad-based populations approach 95 percent vaccination. North Medford High School, with 1637 students has a 95 percent vaccination rate. South Medford High School with 1649 students has a 96 percent rate. But left-coded specialty schools, for example the Butterfly House Montessori, has only a 67 percent vaccination rate. Ashland, an upscale college town, is a blue island in otherwise reddish-purple Southern Oregon. Its Bellview Elementary School has only 84 percent vaccination, its middle school has 87 percent and its high school has 82 percent vaccination.
Right-coded schools show a similar pattern. Grace Christian School has 78 percent vaccination rate. Knox Classical Christian Academy has a 66 percent vaccination rate.
Those universal childhood diseases were universal because they are highly contagious. Vaccination cannot be truly universal because a few people cannot get vaccinated because they are too young or because of some immunity problem that keeps the vaccination from working. Their protection would be the herd, if people who could be vaccinated would consent to it.
But the issue runs up against an American value of body autonomy, one voiced by the abortion choice movement on the left and the MAGA anti-Covid-mandate right. What is good for the community as a whole -- near-universal vaccination -- runs contrary to the right of people to say no for their own private reasons. The most likely consequence of refusing vaccination is that one's child gets the disease. Some will be hospitalized. A few will die. There is some rough justice here: FAFO. Fool Around and Find Out.
Their deaths will not have been in vain. It will be a body language message to their community. Currently, in some communities, vaccination is a close decision. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Dead and disabled people -- like victims of polio I encountered in my youth -- were an unmistakable message that vaccinations against communicable diseases were a good thing. Getting vaccinated was an easy decision for me and my parents.
We are a victim of our prior success with most communicable diseases. They are still rare. Covid deaths were a blurry, unclear message. The people who were most vulnerable were elderly and sick, and the deaths of those people weren't an enormous shock. Everyone dies. They died a little earlier than they otherwise would have.
The death and disability of young people is a different matter. We may need a few conspicuous victims to change attitudes. I regret this, but it is one of the consequences of the diminished respect for government institutions, including ones that address public health.
Experience is a hard, cruel teacher, but some will learn from no other.
10 comments:
Well said, and I'd add it's imperative that we don't empower anti-vax, anti-science, anti-common sense in the administration of our schools with those who would trade musical chairs for Russian Roulette.
Man has sent an object out of our solar system through science, and yet we have people who reject it because of their “belief’s “ as if they are equal?
I fully agree with getting vaccinations unless there is a proven medical reason to NOT get vaccinated. Beliefs should not be a part of the decision.
Vaccinations are to protect the recipient as well as he rest of us.
Are all vaccinations effective. Many are..
What should be continuously investigated is whether some vaccinations do more harm than good.
Why do people believe in viruses? It has been said that the average person in this era has no more personal contact with the evidence for the existence of viruses than people in the middle ages did for the existence of evil spirits. It’s the people with the electron microscopes who have personal experience with that evidence, and the rest of us who believe in viruses have to take it on trust.
In the past decades, the elites who run this country have broken faith with a large portion of the regular people. They have acted to further their own interests, heedless of the damage those actions have caused to the rest of the country. As a result, trust in elites is down across the board, including trust with the medical elites who promote things like vaccines.
When the elites don’t take care of the people, you eventually get populism. You eventually get someone like Trump, or RFK Jr. you get significant numbers of people who refuse vaccines, because they just don’t trust advice from the elites anymore.
I don’t blame the people; they’re just trying to live their lives. I believe the elites who should’ve known better, but didn’t.
The world is moving too fast for humans now. Science education is failing to educate, and when it does, the information it provides is often outdated. To understand the effectiveness of the new vaccine, you need a statistical background and a conviction that science reporting isn't driven by pharmaceutical companies. Too much of the health news is anecdotal. We know little Jimmy was just fine, and then he was diagnosed with autism. The logic follows that it must have been the shot.
For those who care about science and medicine, there’s an article in The Week about this administration’s promotion of crackpot conspiracy theories. It’s no surprise, but it's disturbing and needs to be known:
https://theweek.com/health/rfk-jr-new-plan-sabotaging-vaccines
Trump is an elite. RFK, Jr. is an elite. Musk is the ultimate elite. In that sense it's true that the people have been misled by the elites, but where the people fall short is in swallowing the elites' bullshit in spite of their well-documented history of bold-faced lies and crackpot conspiracy theories.
You don’t need to see viruses or bacteria to believe in the germ theory of disease. Like gravity, it’s pretty self-evident. As for the effectiveness of vaccines, the results speak for themselves.
The germ theory was established by amazing geniuses like Louis Pasteur. There was nothing “self-evident“ about it before the geniuses figured out.
Neither Elon Musk nor RFK Jr were the ones who deindustrialized working class America. They were not part of the elites I am talking about.
FYI: The book of Leviticus contains detailed regulations about identifying and handling those with contagious diseases, as well as guidelines for sanitation and purification. Whether they called it germs or something else, it's empirical knowledge. And those who "deindustrialized the working class" aren't the ones spreading disinformation about vaccines. The gullible swallow it, lower herd immunity and make it everybody's problem.
Post a Comment