Standing Fast

Liza Featherstone at Babble has an excellent piece about the growing refusal by well-meaning, seemingly sane, progressive parents to get their child vaccinated for communicable diseases.

"Among well-educated, comfortably off parents, the ranks of vaccine-resistors are increasing. (Of course, plenty of parents fail to vaccinate their kids not by choice, but because they're poor and lack access to decent healthcare.) Some states with a large number of skeptical, alternative-minded people —Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, New York — have seen, in the past six years, a declining percentage of children vaccinated against polio, diptheria, measles, mumps and rubella."

All those diseases were ancient history when I was growing up thanks to vaccinations, while my grandparents grew up with the very real fear that their children might die or spend the rest of there life in a wheelcare thanks to a bad case of mumps or polio. Why anyone would want to risk going back to days who is not a religious fanatic is beyond me, but as Featherstone writes its the very success of vaccination programs which might be the root of the movement against it.

"Why now? Partly because, although there have been vaccine skeptics for as long as there have been vaccines, they tend to be most vocal when major childhood diseases are in retreat (not many Africans are worrying about autism right now). Side effects from vaccines are not unknown, of course, and since few of us know anyone who has had a vaccine-preventable disease, more and more parents question the risk. Diseases like polio, says Dr. Bernstein, are "out of sight, out of mind, so many parents may not feel the need to have their children vaccinated." In its current form, vaccine resistance bears the familiar markers of Generation X parenthood."

The same problem is found around the outcry over the moves by many local and state governments to institute a mandatory HPV vaccine in schools. According to the Center for Disease Control 1 in 4 women have this STD which one of the leading causes of cervical cancer among women. A massive HPV vaccination plan among children could radically decrease incidents of cervical cancer in the future. But cervical cancer due to HPV won't strike until adulthood and lacks the graphic symptoms of polio or measles which used to kill and cripple thousands of children before the widespread use of vaccinations. So instead parents are focusing on the sexual aspect of the disease("my 13 year old doesn't have sex") and an understandable distrust of big drug companies to fight what by any scientific standard is a big step forward in improving the collective health of America.

What's most distributing about Featherstone's article is that she is talking about "blue-state" Americans who would likely turn their noses at Kansas creationists who are waging their own war on science. And as much as "intelligent design" may be repugnant to any person concerned about progress and modernity, it won't cause the reemergence of preventable killer diseases among children.

Just like the early 60's conservative revival was ringed by bizarre conspiracy theories about fluoridation in the water, the secret doings at the UN, and the possibility that Eisenhower was really a communist, the progressive movement in the early 21st century has spawned the same kind of disturbing fringe-the kind of stuff you might hear on Pacifica-with its 9/11 conspiracies, how Bush stole the election from Kerry and now an anti-vaccination furor. There are progressive people I know who strike me as intelligent enough who believe all three. The first two are just odd and a waste of time but its the last that could cause politicians from backing down in carrying out one of the more important functions of our government; protecting and promoting public health. Already Governor Tim Kaine (D-Va) has had to back off from his plan to vaccinate all teenage girls in the Virginia schools against HPV.

Personal choices in your parenting is fine, but not if it causes the emergence of deadly communicable diseases. At one point the left was associated with rational, science-based discourse not crazed conspiracy thinking or pseudo-libertarian identity politics. We need to reclaim the former.