Vaccines Save Lives.

OJ is a pro-reality blog.  Let’s set the record straight on vaccines.

Vaccines prevent immense human suffering, especially amongst children.  Vaccines are incredibly safe for almost everyone. Immune compromised people who can’t use various vaccines rely on herd immunity. Infants, newborns, and the elderly are particularly dependent on herd immunity.

If you can use a vaccine, and you use choose not get immunized, you are a selfish jerk because you are knowingly put others at risk. Or maybe you just hate kids and retirees.

True, twenty years ago, there was a single paper that suggested there may be an autism risk from the MMR vaccine.  That paper was retracted: “no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.” Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the article, lost his medical license.  His science was not only bad, it was fradulent.

Meanwhile, in yet another medical triumph, a vaccine introduced in 2010 has all but eliminated Meningitis A from west Africa. West Africans may be poor, but they aren’t stupid.

The scourge of small pox was exterminated by vaccines, millions of women will never get cervical cancer thanks to a vaccine, and numerous diseases are prevented everyday by vaccines.

Yet some Californians resist vaccines. This not surprising: perfectly reasonable people can, and often do, arrive at bad conclusions.  Unfortunately, this perfectly understandable human frailty means that a perfectly sensible law to increase California’s herd immunity is facing tough resistance in the legislature.

If you like the idea of kids avoiding suffering, or would rather not see folks over seventy succumb to preventable diseases, please call your State Legislator to support SB 277.

About Tyler in Irvine

Twenty Year Irvine Resident. Native Texan and proud Longhorn. Pro-Choice Ron Paul supporter. "Do I contradict myself? ... then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman