salon | The success of vaccination – of all public health campaigns – relies
on trust. We put faith in medical professionals that they’re acting in
everyone’s best interest, and that faith is undergirded by decades of
medical research. The benefits of vaccination are well documented and
vital to our collective health (you don’t see many people afflicted with
smallpox these days). The arguments against vaccinating have been so
thoroughly debunked that it’s impossible to mount a coherent argument
against the practice. But even still, trust can be eroded when the
people we put in positions of authority give unwarranted deference to
discredited ideas.
And that brings us to Rand Paul, United States
Senator from Kentucky and doctor of medicine. The last few months have
witnessed two high-profile public health scares: the resurgence of
measles as a consequence of anti-vaccine activism, and the Ebola panic.
Few people in positions of authority have acted as irresponsibly in
addressing these health concerns as Sen. Paul.
When health scares are in the news, print and broadcast networks
inevitably ask Rand Paul for his opinion because he is a doctor (of
ophthalmology, but a doctor nonetheless) and a likely 2016 presidential
candidate. On vaccinations, Paul went on television yesterday and
endorsed the centerpiece of the junk anti-vaccine argument: that the
injections somehow induce autism and other mental disorders in young
children. “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal
children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines,”
Paul said on CNBC. He may as well have laid blame for mental illness on an imbalance of the humors – he’d have been no less inaccurate.
He also presented the vaccination argument as a question of “freedom”
from government tyranny. “The state doesn’t own your children,” he
argued. “Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and
public health.” That’s a very strange way of describing the parent-child
relationship, but he’s right that the state does not own your kid. The
state does, however, have a compelling interest in making sure your
child/property isn’t a vector for highly contagious diseases. But
behaving in a way that is dangerous – both for your child and the
community – is your “freedom,” so fight the power and show big
government that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time
with the pertussis-laden saliva of toddlers.
1 comments:
http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=bioweapons+labs WASHINGTON’S BLOG: You said recently that laboratories in West Africa run by the Centers for Disease Control and Tulane University are doing bioweapons research. What documentary evidence do you have of that?
You mentioned that a map produced by the CDC shows where the laboratories are located on the West Coast of Africa?
DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: Yes. They’ve got one in Monrovia [the capital of Ebola-stricken Liberia] … one in Kenema, Sierra Leone [the third largest city in the Ebola-hotzone nation], which was shut down this summer because the government there believed that it was the Tulane vaccines which had set this whole thing off.
And then they have another one in Guinea, where the first case [of Ebola] was reported.
http://youtu.be/am9BqZ6eA5c
Post a Comment