This Frontline report made me want to cry. People are not getting their kids vaccinated for no good reason. They’re starting to get sick and some are going to end up disabled or dead. Again, for no good reason.
Just two years after a deadly outbreak of polio raged across the country, the children lined up in the basement gymnasium of a Pittsburgh elementary school for what became the largest medical experiment in America.
One by one, they were led to tables draped in white cloth and covered with vials, waiting for their turn to be injected with a vaccine newly created to combat the catastrophic disease.
One giggled. Others fidgeted. Some of the youngest shrieked as needles with the red liquid were inserted into their arms.
In less than two hours, it was over. Dr. Jonas Salk, the creator of the vaccine, injected 137 children before they were led to an area shrouded by curtains to rest.
Under the glare of news cameras, the first public trial of the vaccine at Arsenal Elementary School in 1954 was a turning point in the battle against an epidemic that had left thousands of people dead and even more sickened and paralyzed.
The shots would nearly eliminate the polio cases spreading across the country and help build a broad acceptance of childhood immunizations for decades to follow.
But the Pittsburgh school that helped launch one of medicine’s most towering achievements is now at high risk of another dangerous childhood disease: measles.
We are intentionally going backwards because we have allowed a political faction that is hostile to science for religious (evolution) and capitalistic (fossil fuel) reasons to dominate our society to such an extent that they have convinced people to reject the advances that made our country the most advanced in the world. Now we’re going to have to learn it all over again the hard way.
This is not an accident and it wasn’t not inevitable. I don’t want to hear anything about how people are threatened by modernity and losing their status and can’t help being racist or anything else. This was a concerted campaign to devalue science by very specific institutions in our society and a political party that exploited it for power. That’s what happened and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.
You can watch the whole thing at the link. It’s depressing but unsurprising.