Vaccination

Following up on the Courtland missive last week:

The WSJ had an editorial this past week about the effects of exemption on vaccination. The OpEd ranted about how the un-vaccinated can lead to unintended effect (i.e. mini-epidemics). But sadly the writer did not really address the cost-benefit of why these uninoculated persons are so lethal. It has a scientific basis.

I shall use, as an allegory, an epidemic from antiquity as the example: The bubonic plaque.

The plague has not been around forever. Instead, a historical view has shown that the plague only popped up in the later points of the Greek culture and expanded upon the aggregation of humans into urban centers (most famously in the middle ages and the renaissance in Europe). This development of the pathogen, Yersina pestis, was aided by the close arrangement of populations in walled cities (middle ages) and explosive development of urban centers during the Renaissance. This effect could be extened to leprosy, smallpox, polio, cholera, etc. Simply, the condensation of humans into core centers (which benefits plague, smallpox, and leprosy) and the lack of effective management of sewage and decay (polio and cholera) led to these disease becoming epidemics. But in our democratic society, some are allowed a pass to vaccination. A core set of vaccinated people prevents the development of the establishment of disease and this can lead to lethality when some of these Typhoid Mary like harbors of bacteria or virus persist. So the core concern is will we, as a society, allow these pathogen harbors to persist? Should religious beliefs trump common sense? Should our society let some have a free pass from vaccination in order to become petri dishes? I say not.

However my views do not matter (yes that is petulant). The collective should resist these slefish petri dishes. Democracy is the fiat of the majority. Ask any black person - they know what "democrary" entails. And if you don't believe that, then ask any HIV person (who is now dead) in the 1980s. If we want to live in cities and drink and eat from centralized resources, then we must accept the laws (not theories or hypotheses of the exceptors) of science. Not PC garbage.

People living cheek to jowl in our society must accept that public health supercedes their individual rights. If you don't like it, go live in the Yukon and eat reindeer and live 4 months in complete darkness. Sounds harsh and unfair? Then you can die of the effects of whooping cough or measles or mumps or smallpox or polio. And I can tell you right now, that individual needs pale in comparison to the calls of "bring out your dead".