Battling the antivaccination activists

Just a few decades ago antivaccinationists were known as ’statistics’. All reasonable parents rushed their kids to the pediatrician’s office as each new vaccine came available because the parents both personally suffered Vaccine Preventable Illness (VPI) as well as witnessed gruesome and sometimes fatal results from VPI.

Very quickly communal memory has faded, especially as families have fragmented and modern mothers do not have their own mother’s and grandmother’s memories of VPI to remind them why they need to get their kids vaccinated. Now their kids can just sponge off of herd immunity. That strategy works only as long as the endemic rate of disease remains low, but every so often a critial mass of vulnerable people comes available and natural selection again comes to the fore. Missouri went through several years of pertussus (whooping cough) recently, with several deaths.

Bad ideas will be culled from the herd; if not through acceptance of rational discussion then through the cold hard facts of bacteria in the blood stream doubling in number every 2 hours.