Pricked off
The passage of SB 277 in California last week was outshone by the two SCOTUS decisions—whew! and wow!—but is still a fragile victory for health. No shots, no school. And no exemptions, save for good medical reasons.* It's a victory for children, and for everyone they might sneeze on: the infants too young to be vaccinated, the frail elderly, the immunocompromised, the unlucky. Lives will be saved. No wonder the anti-vaxxers are hysterical.
They're fighting tooth and nail to get this overturned.
They scare me.
Just look what they've loosed on the world.
There's the crunchy family in Ottawa who thought that not vaccinating their children was wisdom; reconsidered; and before they could act, found themselves in quarantine with pertussis, with seven desperately wretched children whooping and puking.
There's the unvaccinated six-year-old boy in Spain who just died of diphtheria, of "the strangling angel," like a child in a Victorian storybook. His was the first case in Spain for 28 years: his doctors had to have the antitoxin flown in from Russia. And even with the antitoxin, even with all the resources of a modern hospital, they couldn't save him. His parents now say that they were "tricked" by anti-vaxxers.
And there's the four-year-old in hospice in California, dying of a complication of measles. He never had a chance to be vaccinated: he was an infant when he caught it. SSPE is a horrific death, stealthy and inexorable, which may arise years after what seemed an uneventful course of measles. Even if a patient doesn't die of measles (1-2 deaths per 1,000 cases), or its insufficiently rare aftereffects (1-2 deaths per 10,000 cases), recent studies have shown that just having measles screws with the immune system for up to three years afterward, leaving the patient more vulnerable to other diseases.
And don't get me started on polio...
Sadly, the only thing that might get through to the crazies is an epidemic among their snowflakes.
Nine
* Dead certainty: crank doctors will be making a fortune from crazy parents, signing false exemptions.
They're fighting tooth and nail to get this overturned.
They scare me.
Just look what they've loosed on the world.
There's the crunchy family in Ottawa who thought that not vaccinating their children was wisdom; reconsidered; and before they could act, found themselves in quarantine with pertussis, with seven desperately wretched children whooping and puking.
There's the unvaccinated six-year-old boy in Spain who just died of diphtheria, of "the strangling angel," like a child in a Victorian storybook. His was the first case in Spain for 28 years: his doctors had to have the antitoxin flown in from Russia. And even with the antitoxin, even with all the resources of a modern hospital, they couldn't save him. His parents now say that they were "tricked" by anti-vaxxers.
And there's the four-year-old in hospice in California, dying of a complication of measles. He never had a chance to be vaccinated: he was an infant when he caught it. SSPE is a horrific death, stealthy and inexorable, which may arise years after what seemed an uneventful course of measles. Even if a patient doesn't die of measles (1-2 deaths per 1,000 cases), or its insufficiently rare aftereffects (1-2 deaths per 10,000 cases), recent studies have shown that just having measles screws with the immune system for up to three years afterward, leaving the patient more vulnerable to other diseases.
And don't get me started on polio...
Sadly, the only thing that might get through to the crazies is an epidemic among their snowflakes.
Nine
* Dead certainty: crank doctors will be making a fortune from crazy parents, signing false exemptions.
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