In elementary school, as each Christmas approached, the nuns presented us with two fund raising opportunities. One was selling boxes of hard Christmas candy, a pre-Dolly Parton Hard Candy Christmas, and the other was boxes of Christmas cards based on Christmas and general winter scenes that had been painted by a guy in an iron lung who had to hold his brushes in his mouth.

The iron lung, for those unfamiliar with it, was a tubular contraption people lied in with only their head sticking out of one end while the alternating pressure within allowed them to breath as polio affected their chest muscles making breathing on their own extremely difficult if not impossible. This was not temporary in most cases, but, at the time, what the rest of your life was to be.

The longest a person was dependent on one was 60 years.

Anyone growing up in the 1950s, the height of the Polio epidemic, would have been familiar with this contraption whether through innumerable pictures in newspapers and on television of rooms filled with them arranged in neat rows, or having a relative in one.

The less severe, but just as feared, common sight was of your peers who could only walk with the help of leg braces.

If you are not familiar with either, the reason is simple. They came up with a Polio vaccine that was first administered through a needle, and later in either a sugar cube or a paper shot glass. You are unfamiliar with what had been common place because the vaccines improved people’s immunity to polio.

It might still be out there, but your chance of contracting it was reduced until it became seemingly non-existent.

The scourge of Chicken Pox and other childhood diseases was brought under control by vaccinations, so the claim they are no longer needed because kids don’t get those diseases anymore ignores the fact that they don’t because of vaccination.

Before I could teach in Boston and Los Angeles I had to take a tuberculosis test to see if, even though I was not suffering from it, I was a carrier who could spread it to vulnerable students in my classroom.

Just because I showed no signs, it did not mean the illness as not there and communicable.

If your child is vaccinated against such things as Chicken Pox, they are protected from unknown carriers.

For the health of all students, school districts require certain vaccinations against preventable diseases because large groups of children spend the majority of their waking hours in rooms filled with kids, each one a possible carrier of a disease whose symptoms aren’t on display.

But there are parents who, not seeing any examples of it, come to the conclusion that certain childhood diseases are no longer a threat because kids don’t get them, and that, along with some odd idea about individual freedom, choose not to be told to vaccinate their kids and, thereby, expose them to something they might contract when contraction could have been avoided.

 

Hard to yell “Freedom” in an iron lung.

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It is not just the uneducated who forgo vaccinating their kids, but what are referred to as “anti-vaxers” count among themselves professional people with great educations.

After parents stopped vaccinating their kids because a report by Andrew Wakefield, a discredited former British doctor who was discredited due to unethical behavior, misconduct and dishonesty, claimed that vaccines caused autism, and this false claim was promoted by people like Jenny McCarthy, a model, actor, and occasional television host, a resurgence of childhood diseases began.

In spite of that report having been debunked, people still refer to it when justifying their resistance to required vaccines.

After CNN reported that Clark County, Washington is in the middle of a measles outbreak, and that the  Washington’s governor has declared a state of emergency after at least 58 people had been infected since January, Darla Shine, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Bill Shine who had been a Fox News executive, went on a Twitter rant about vaccinations using the has tags “Fake”and “Hysteria”, and suggested the country  should “Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases” because “they keep you healthy & fight cancer.”

She claimed that she had had the usual childhood diseases like Measles and Chicken Pox and this resulted in  lifelong immunity that her own kids would not develop because they got vaccinated.

The childhood diseases against which kids get vaccinated may not have extreme results in all cases, but they also cause death.

While she did okay and wasn’t a casualty, is she really serious suggesting that other parents should take the gamble with their kids, one she didn’t take with her own?

Before the vaccine was introduced in 1960, between 400 and 500 people died from measles each year.

In 2018 measles cases rose 30% in Europe and the United States where parents are opting not to vaccinate their children.

While some parents delay vaccinating their children because of the unnecessary “discussion” on the misinformation spread by false reports and non-medical people like McCarthy and Shine, some do get around to having their kids vaccinated, but there are those who will refuse to vaccinate based on religious reasons.

As religious objections to many things has become a popular reason to justify behaviors not necessarily truly religiously based, but more on a political interpretation of religion, requiring proof that the parents’ claim that their refusal to vaccinate because of their “genuine and sincere religious belief” is gaining popularity.  There needs to be more than broad, nebulous claims of religious freedom to combating preventable diseases through immunizations especially when other people’s children are at stake.

There are medical reasons for not getting a vaccination. I am regularly asked by my doctor, before I get a shot for something, if I have an allergy to one of the named ingredient. And that is understandable.

But religious, political, or philosophical objections need deeper inspection.

 

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