I almost headed straight back into my shop when I started reading the news feeds. A 19.5% increase in Measles in the US in one week! Every media source I looked at had some news about the number of people not having their children vaccinated. A doctor's office refusing to allow patients into the office if they haven't been vaccinated or if they suspected Measles like symptoms.
I began a Google search. I was appalled at the amount of media coverage the anti vaccination movement is getting. We even have a teacher in Canada being investigated for promoting anti-vax literature. Polls in North America are showing alarming numbers of people that don't believe in vaccination. Why are these people getting the floor? There are tons of people out there that say the holocaust didn't happen. Why doesn't the press interview them? Why aren't there front page stories in dozens of publications explaining their point of view? Wow! I just cannot believe that the world has come to a point where irrational nutjobs are filling our headlines. We are just giving them a platform to argue their case and get more people leaning their way. Sadly the more they promote, the more people start to believe them. Over 21% of Albertans, Canada's western, conservative, heartland, are against vaccinations. That puts them WAY below that required for herd immunity. This is scary.
Why did I start this story with a long winded description of a shelf? I was looking for a way to put this all into perspective. Turns out that Measles and severed fingers have a parallel. (No, I did not shed blood in pursuit of an in wall fish tank.) I don't have a big shop, just a corner of our basement that I commandeered. It is, however, a pretty well equipped shop. Nearly everything a decent wood working shop should have. Darn near every power hand tool known to man as well. What almost all those tools have in common is that they can happily remove nice chunks of meat from anything that gets in the way. I have tools that will punch nice neat hole in the palm of your hand and others that will take a leg off. Each and every one of these Michael Meyers Specials have something else in common. They all have some sort of mechanism to make it harder to maim yourself, IF used as directed. The myriad of guards, lockouts, etc. that have been added by the manufacturer are engineered to make the tool as safe as possible while allowing the operator to slice through two inch hardwood like butter. Should you decide to operate the tool with the guard removed you will likely complete many jobs before finally loosing a finger, or worse. I do not suggest that the moment you plug in a saw without the appropriate guard, something terrible will happen. I am suggesting that by doing so you are exponentially increasing the risk that you will finish life with less fingers than you started with. Even something as simple as hammering in a nail can disfigure you for life. I have a pair of safety glasses that have some pretty nasty gouges in the lenses that have stopped all kinds of projectiles. One stands out. I was attempting to drive a finishing nail, at an angle, through a piece of tin. The nail shot out from under the hammer, glanced of the center of my right lense and proceeded upward, only to stick into the fibre panel of my suspended ceiling. Thank-you safety glasses.What the Anti-Vaxers are suggesting is that we take the guards off our everyday lives. Vaccines protect us from some of the threats that lurk through-out our lives. Polio, Measles, Chickenpox, Diphtheria, are just some of the diseases that vaccines protect us from. When was the last time you heard of someone contracting Polio? Exactly! That is what happens when we use the safety features provided. We are protected. Take the safety features off and all bets are off. The more people running around without protection, the more the diseases spread throughout the community. Somewhere between 85% and 94% of the population needs to be immunized to provide, what science calls, herd immunity, depending on the disease and its transmission method. Herd immunity is when enough individuals are protected that those that have not developed immunity are also protected.
If you lived alone and others never ventured into your shop, then the risk that a projectile, launched from your table saw, would injure someone else is impossibly low. Go ahead and toss all the safety features from your tools. No skin off my back should you sever a hand and bleed to death on the floor. However, if I was to walk into your shop and see the safeties removed from your tools, I would rather strongly recommend their re-application or I'm out of there. It is a very selfish person indeed that says that it is their right to decide whether they should be allowed to put me in danger.
How would the anti-vaxer feel when his elderly mother dies after contracting pneumococcal disease from them, because they refused to be vaccinated? Why can't these people get it through there thick skulls that it is not their right to put the rest of us at risk. Long before vaccines, whole populations where wiped out because they had no immunity to Chickenpox. These are not cases of the sniffles. These are serious diseases that they seem bent on reintroducing into society. One of the arguments they use is that vaccinations can cause Autism. Let me point out that there are NO studies or research that have connected Autism to vaccinations. There was a poorly executed statistical analysis that made a connection years ago. Even the author of that report has since retracted that after recognizing his mistake. Conspiracy theorists will suggest that he did that under threat from the government.
Let me pose this question... If all pharmaceutical manufacturers are required by law to indicate any possible side effects to the drugs they make, WHY would the vaccines they make be exempt?If the folks that want to put an end to vaccinations read the possible side effects to Tylenol would they immediately want that pulled from the shelves? Come on, people! Use a little common sense. Everything, and I mean everything that we put in our bodies has a side effect. Lets take a look at dilutional hyponatremia. You can die from it. It is when you are poisoned by, of all things, water. Not impure water, just too much water. Drink too much water and you become intoxicated, drink some more and you become, well, dead. I don't hear anyone suggesting that we stop drinking water. If there really is a risk of some sort of negative side effect to a very small percentage of the population while protecting the lives of millions more, isn't that an acceptable risk? While science has yet to warn us of any ill effects, other than soreness at the point of injection or the possibility of some mild symptoms of the disease being introduced into our system, I will concede that there may be something else going on that we are currently unaware of. That does not give anyone the right to put the rest of the population at risk. I have never understood the concept of a vaccination exemption in any case other than strictly medical. It is those people that can not be vaccinated that are relying on the rest of us to maintain that herd immunity.
If you would like to argue that it is your right to raise your children any way you want, you would be wise to consider the effect you are having on the child's future. You are handing the kid a power tool with the guard removed. They may do just fine for a good portion of their life, but eventually...
Are you willing to risk your child's life on bad science and a principal derived from it? If your answer is "yes", then ask yourself this. Do you think I am willing to risk my child's life so that you can have the right to refuse vaccination?
Let's be clear here. It is not so much stupidity as it is a lack of social awareness. We, as a society, have become so self-centric that we no longer see how our actions impact others. It is far more important that we have the illusion that we live our lives our way and don't want anyone telling us what to do. No sense of community.
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