For mysterious reasons, there have been anti-vaccination movements since vaccination was invented.* The eradication of smallpox from the earth; the near eradication of polio (which terrified the population in the 1950s); and the near elimination of measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, typhus and other diseases which formerly maimed and killed many children; and many other triumphs ought to have convinced people that vaccination was an unalloyed benefit to humanity. But somehow it's profitable to deny this obvious reality.
The near miraculous success of the Covid 19 vaccines turns out to be one more opportunity for charlatans to get rich. As Politico reports:
The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a remarkable financial windfall for anti-vaccine nonprofits. Revenue more than doubled for the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense in 2021 compared to the year prior, according to a POLITICO analysis of tax filings. The nonprofits that survived on operating budgets of around a few million dollars just a few years prior are now raking in more than $10 million each.
“Covid vaccines have been the foot in the door for the more general anti-vaccine movement. And unfortunately, that door is open pretty wide now,” said Dr. Dave Gorski, a Michigan-based oncologist who has been tracking anti-vaccine efforts for two decades.
The funding spike reflects a sea change for once-fringe entities. The anti-vaccine movement has now emerged as a modern political force. In practical terms, greater funds enable anti-vaccine groups to expand their public reach, sue federal agencies and organize like-minded activists at the state level, as well as expand their reach abroad.
I don't get it.
* In 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner, having heard folklore that dairymaids who contracted the disease cowpox were subsequently immune to smallpox, inoculated a young boy with pus from cowpox lesions and found him to be immune. He repeated the experiment a few times and published his results in 1798. By 1800 the procedure had spread to most of Europe. He called the procedure "vaccination" from the Latin vacca, meaning cow. In this case humanity benefited from the happy fact that infection with a the relatively non-virulent cowpox conferred immunity to the related smallpox virus. However, development of other vaccines would have to await the scientific discovery of pathogenic agents by Pasteur and Koch in the late 19th Century, and the development of the science of virology in the 20th.
3 comments:
In general, I think vaccines are a godsend. But in your post, you've only given the great successes. There have been many failures and even a few disasters.
he MnRA technology is new and when it was first introduced to the public, it was still classified as "experimental".
So, I wouldn't beat up the public too much for a healthy skepticism.
It's the same thing that drives modern-day Republicans: the Thanatos urge. Get busy living, or get busy dying. They've chosen the latter; you can't live in the middle. It's all projection: their ignorance and fear latches on to an "idea" (no matter how false or malevolent) from a "truth-teller" (read: mentally ill person, normal in most ways but fixated on a piece of garbage in their minds, like Henry Ford was). Followers without lives or knowledge step in line and end up on street corners displaying pictures of partially-aborted fetuses to share their "outrage," when what they're really rageful about is the father or mother who beat or raped them as a child ... or the neglect they suffered ... etc. ... but they don't know that.
All the energy contained in their protoplasm is co-opted by a malevolent, prominent figure who has his/her/their own issues, and the sickness spreads.
Most people on Earth have no idea why they do what they do. For all practical purposes, they're asleep, living in a nightmare created by others and their own human psyche.
Anti-vaxxing is one such nightmare of a diseased collective unconscious, doing battle with concepts of health that this nightmare's practitioners can't tolerate, for whatever reasons.
Ducky -- While it is true that there have been a couple of vaccines that either turned out not to be worth it, or were withdrawn because of safety problems, the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine was tested in very large scale trials and found to be extremely safe and highly effective in preventing serious disease. It was labeled experimental because the usual time table for approval was accelerated, and it's still subject to post marketing surveillance, which continues to show that it is very safe. While I can understand that the accelerated approval made some people nervous, the antivax movement goes much farther than that, and makes all sorts of absurd and preposterous and simply fictitious claims. If it were limited to reasonable reservations that would be an entirely different discussion.
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