Alive and Healthy

I have a few friends on facebook and in the real world that have beliefs that I find curious. Okay, there are more than a few of my friends that are odd in one way or another that is what I like about them for the most part. What I find curious is that some of my friends are antivac people.

The first time I heard “antivac”, I just thought they were people who hated to clean the house. I completely understand; I don’t like having to clean the house either. If God had wanted us to have clean houses He would design them so that the prevailing winds would do the dusting for us. It turns out that “antivac” people don’t believe in vaccinations. It isn’t like they don’t believe in vaccinations like some people don’t believe in an all powerful being (who cleans homes with the wind), but they simply feel that vaccinations aren’t good for you.

Gob smacked!!!

I am a child of the sixties and have taken to heart that we can and do have a better life due to drugs both legal and should be legal. When I was little and sick, my mom would give me medicine that the doctor gave her for me and generally I would feel better within a short period of time. In grade school I can remember lining up in the school gymnasium with all of the other kids in the school and we would be inoculated for smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and polio. I didn’t care what was happening, just so long as I got out of class and close enough to Mike Rogers to watch him faint when he saw the needle. Nearly six decades later, I still haven’t contracted any of those diseases so the inoculations must have worked.

I am sure that the antivacs people would have me believe that I would never have contracted the disease anyway. In my mind they are wrong. I have a buddy, just a little older than I am and he came down with polio and it has affected his foot all of his life. My uncle had his left side paralysed. Polio was and still is a horrible disease. Thankfully, it is almost eradicated in the world, almost but not quite and if we aren’t vigilant it will come back. By vigilant I mean that kids need to get the vaccine, ALL KIDS in the world. There is a wonderful podcast that interviews Bill Gates and then the man in charge of the Gates Foundation polio eradication program, Jay Wenger. It is a fascinating hour and forty minutes. If you want to cut out Bill Gates, he is interviewed for the first 40 minutes so just skip it.

 http://nerdist.com/nerdist-podcast-bill-gates/

I understand the paranoia about government and big business using us as pawns and I think I can wrap my head around the “scientific” reasons why I shouldn’t use the available medication. What I don’t understand is Why. Why would any government or business seek to poison us? Money? Power? Just ‘cause? Yes, some people live to be 104 and have only chewed willow bark and taken a shot of vodka every day since they were 7. Far more people have died before their time because they were unable to get the proper medication.

We shouldn’t be asking first world people about vaccinations, we should be asking a mother in Afghanistan if she would like a drug that might keep her baby alive and healthy.