Occam's Razor

It’s nice to get some validation that you were a good parent. The latest was a tweet from my 29-year-old daughter publicly thanking her mom and me for getting her vaccinated. She was watching a documentary on rubella that scared the crap out of her until she realized that we had vaccinated her against it.

I’m not sure we deserve plaudits for doing what every parent should be doing, but that many are not. What I would like to do is to make it criminal for parents not to get their kids vaccinated against common communicable diseases. At a minimum, these parents are guilty of child abuse. Maybe their kids would end up in a foster home, but at least their foster parents would get them vaccinated.

Maybe I’m pro-life at heart. I think that kids deserve the right to grow up strong and healthy and with a minimum of unnecessary misery and death. These days, of course, being pro-life means forcing women to carry to term pregnancies, and to not give a damn about the mother and the kids afterward. This is borne out by, well, not caring if they get their kids vaccinated against wholly preventable diseases!

It’s hard to miss the news that there are a lot of bad parents out there, i.e. parents who won’t get their kids vaccinated. It’s not too hard to do it these days because you can claim it’s against your religion or deeply held beliefs or pretty much for whatever reason you want in some states. That’s because states are increasingly reluctant to trample on parents rights. It’s all about freedom or something, i.e. the parents’ freedom to make decisions for their kids, not their kids right to not become a victim to preventable diseases that used to kill millions.

Anti-vaxxer parents have their reasons for not getting their kids vaccinated, but none of them make any sense. For example, there is zero credible evidence that vaccinations cause autism. But even if you grant that parents should decide whether their kids should be able to catch these diseases, they shouldn’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us. Because that’s what’s going on with these recent measles outbreaks: if almost all of us are not vaccinated, those of us who do catch these diseases can pass them on, sometimes to people who have been vaccinated because there are newer mutant strains of the disease, like measles.

I had measles, chickenpox and mumps as a kid because there was no vaccine available. Fortunately I was young enough not to remember the impact they had on me. While I don’t remember having them, you can bet that when it’s time for my booster shot I’ll happily raise my arm for it. Most recently, I raised my arm for a shingles shot, which is recommended if you are age sixty or over. The doctor didn’t have to ask me. I brought it up, even though my physical was a month before I turned sixty. (I got it about a week after I turned sixty; insurance won’t pay for it before then.) I have friends who got shingles in their sixties and each says that it was the most painful thing they have ever endured. I’m not going to take that chance.

Children of course can’t speak for themselves; it’s a parent’s job to act in their best interest. With my daughter, I got her vaccinated for everything I could legally get away with. She did end up with the chickenpox, but only because the vaccine was not approved at the time. A few months after she got it, the vaccine was finally approved. Tough luck for her. When the HPV vaccine came out though I made sure she got that even though she was a young teen who was not sexually active. It would be up to her if she chose to be sexually active, but most people are at least at some point in their lives, so there was no point in taking chances in getting cervical cancer. In addition, I made sure she was vaccinated against both Hepatitis A and B, also getting both shots for myself. As we’ve done a lot of foreign travel lately, they might have come in handy. I don’t know for sure but I do know I didn’t come down from these diseases. Neither will she.

I doubt any parent intends to be malicious by not vaccinating their kids. They probably think they are doing their kids a favor. What’s really going on though is that they are believing disinformation or not taking the time to truly study the issue. Certain vaccines can actually cause the condition it is supposed to prevent, but only in very rare cases, and it’s virtually impossible in the case of vaccines with dead viruses. In many of these cases, your kid would have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting the disease from the shot.

This is freedom gone amok. Whether we like it or not, we are all part of the same biosphere. We all have to live with each other. We have an implicit obligation to society not to transmit preventable diseases. Thankfully we haven’t had a real pandemic like the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed millions in a very long time, so long that we don’t think it can happen again. It killed an aunt I never met. But we are definitely playing with fire and when it happens, it won’t be just these anti-vaxxer parents kids that will die many miserable and preventable deaths. It will be millions of the rest of us who did our best for our kids but because we allowed boneheaded parents to opt their kids out of vaccines ended up killing millions of the rest of us too.

What these parents are doing to not just their children but also to the rest of us is criminal. It should be treated that way.