This week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart is a shot in the arm about the importance of vaccines. Please check it out, and share it with your friends and family.
We’ve all heard the recent news that diseases like measles are making a comeback in some parts of the U.S. thanks to some parents decision to not vaccinate their kids (or to vaccinate them on a different schedule than what doctors recommend). Vaccine rates remain pretty high overall (although the U.S. is far from first place), but super-infectious diseases like measles only require a bit of complacency to rear their ugly viral heads.
Anyone needing further reminder of just how effective vaccines have been at saving lives need only look at this infographic by Leon Farrant:
As Seth Mnookin puts it, vaccines have become “victims of their own success.”
What do I mean by that? Thankfully (Jonas Salk FTW!), almost no one in my generation knows anybody with polio, or any of a host of other horrible diseases. But I worry this has made their threats seem distant, giving us a sort of complacency or “generational amnesia” for things that are actually really freakin’ dangerous. In fact, my video features a story about scurvy, another forgotten disease, that rings disturbingly true today.
Vaccine fears are not new. They didn’t start with Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield or the completely fraudulent claims of vaccines causing autism. They actually go back to 1796 when Edward Jenner tested the first smallpox vaccine. But to refuse them, to deny their life-saving importance in this day and age, in a nation where science has allowed us to have a quality of life never before seen in the history of human civilization, that is the worst kind of privilege.
When we protect ourselves and our children with vaccines, we protect everyone around us. As Eula Biss says, vaccines are “based on people voluntarily using their bodies to protect other vulnerable people.” They are one of the most altruistic and friendly things we can do to aid our fellow humans. Let’s not forget that.
