Kids are back in school and so, too, is the ever-increasing risk of them catching a severe or even lethal transmissible disease because parents of their peers are irresponsible in regards to mandatory vaccinations.
With rampant hysteria and disinformation in social media — also spread among celebrities and “influencers” — as well as increasingly complicated and sometimes unaffordable costs, mandatory vaccinations and changing laws to increase compliance fall to the wayside.
This is the perfect time to make state legislators talk about it.
While the United States, and especially states like Colorado, were muddling along before the COVID pandemic, the wildfire-spread of a communicable disease has illustrated the power and wisdom of developing and implementing vaccines.
We’ve joined pediatricians and scientists repeatedly, and we — as well as others working to overcome the state’s dangerous ignorance — will keep repeating it until lawmakers take action: Colorado regularly ranks worst or near-worst in the nation for vaccination rates, and it’s endangering lives, health and costing millions of dollars.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that critical combined vaccination rates in Colorado are at an alarming low 69%, putting thousands of children at risk of an outbreak. These are children, who once infected, can, and do, infect other children and most dangerously, children and adults with compromised immune systems.
The problem stems from past legislators, succumbing to fake science and political pressure, who were either sympathetic to misguided parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their children, or shortsighted in thinking that making it easy to “opt-out” of mandatory vaccines was just no big deal.
To date, Colorado still allows for a “philosophical” rejection of vaccine mandates.
The root of most of this growing crisis came from a regularly discredited study run by a discredited doctor to tie autism to childhood vaccinations, and the U.S. media bought the hoax, helping to legitimize it.
There is not one reputable pediatrician, pediatric organization, hospital, clinic or researcher that does not vehemently work to debunk the autism lie and insist that parents to vaccinate their children.
In Colorado, it’s still easier to say that you don’t want to vaccinate children than to prove that you have, that despite feeble attempts to shore up vaccine mandates.
Many lawmakers, and too much of the public, erroneously believe that since the bulk of the “herd” was vaccinated against potentially lethal diseases such as measles, polio and whooping cough, we’re all protected.
They’re wrong. Dead wrong for some people. The incidence of those diseases continues to increase as vaccination rates decline.
Recent reports of deaths of people with depressed immune systems sounded an alarm for all of us: Colorado, and the country, is at grave risk.
Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that only 93% of children starting kindergarten in the previous school year came to school fully vaccinated, a 1% drop from the school year before that.
The numbers are even more alarming in Colorado.
It means an increasing number of children are susceptible to entirely preventable diseases like measles, chickenpox, rubella and, astonishingly, polio. Active polio virus is now being regularly detected in places like New York where an unvaccinated man was paralyzed in 2022 by a polio infection.
It’s not just a cause for missed school or uncomfortable malady. These diseases can be and are deadly.
One death followed a measles outbreak at Disneyland six years ago that sickened 100 people, all because foolish, misled, selfish people have avoided childhood vaccination rules.
Real scientists and medical professionals have been unequivocal: The purported danger of childhood vaccines are lies. Dangerous lies. Colorado must join California and similar states in solving an ailing public health problem that’s easy to cure.
Four years ago, California virtually eliminated all exemptions to that state’s childhood vaccination policy.
Colorado must join that state and require every child who attends a public school or college undergo vaccination.
Colorado schools, rec centers, colleges, day cares gyms and employers should all demand that people comply with vaccination programs.
It’s almost unthinkable that a country like the United States would slide back decades in health care progress, risking the lives of millions of Americans potentially exposed to diseases we nearly eradicated — because of lies, laziness or ignorant fear.
If parents still won’t listen and comply, then lawmakers must act to protect the rest of the public, and even the naive or selfish from themselves.
