Posted by Josh Rosenau on July 20, 2010 Calitics has the story about that whooping cough epidemic:
With whooping cough now at epidemic levels, it’s becoming clear that one of the primary culprits is the idiotic trend over the last 10 years of parents, mostly affluent whites, opting out of vaccination out of a baseless fear that the vaccines are unsafe.
Vaccination rates won’t recover until a sizable body count builds up.
Recovery would be faster but Wakefield is still free rather than in jail where he belongs. Still, nice to see that justice of a sort prevailed and he lost his license.
I guess a reason for not using vaccination due to safety concerns can be an issue, but I think economic factor can play a bigger role. Ideally, costs shouldn’t matter when it comes to health. Unfortunately, avoiding high costs at the expense of maintaining good health is becoming problematic. This can be the case for Californians.
Recovery would be faster but Wakefield is still free rather than in jail where he belongs. Still, nice to see that justice of a sort prevailed and he lost his license.
Please don’t think I am being mean spirited and spiteful when I hope that this kind of behavior might reduce the frequency of deleterious genes in the pool. Of course, the loss of herd immunity may put innocents who cannot be vaccinated for valid medical reasons at risk, too, and that is the real tragedy here.
Okay. Maybe that was mean-spirited and spiteful, but the point remains.
@Sam – as pointed out in the article, it is mostly stupid affluent people who intentionally opting out.
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not battling creationists or modeling species ranges, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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