The measles are coming. Get used to it.
It’s measles now. But expect chicken pox, rubella and bacterial meningitis to follow soon as the long brewing Colorado vaccine scandal erupts into epidemics.
Don’t expect any help from state lawmakers. They agree every parent has a right to withhold life-saving vaccines from their kids at the expense of sickening or even killing other children and the infirm who cannot tolerate inoculation.
This weekend, Democrats in the state House and Senate shamelessly boasted about a bill that virtually does nothing to offset the looming plague almost certain to strike the metro area.
House Bill 1312, which cleared the state House on Saturday, keeps a loophole in the law allowing parents to opt out of mandatory vaccinations — because they feel like it.
For the past several years, fewer and fewer parents have been vaccinating their kids against measles, mumps and rubella.
The reason, for the most part, is that an increasing number of parents have fallen victim to undeniably false and dangerous anti-vax propaganda. There are now so many parents who don’t vaccinate their children, that Colorado has become the state with the most un-vaccinated children entering kindergarten.
Elsewhere, you surely haven’t missed increasing reports of massive measles outbreaks across the country — at least 700 cases so far for a disease that was once eradicated in the United States — even in places where vaccination rates are much better than in Colorado.
So get ready to get sick, if you haven’t been vaccinated. If it’s your own children you’ve doomed to illness because of your ignorance or stubbornness, you’re going to be amazed how ill they can be. They won’t be thanking you.
Beyond sick, you could be one of growing number of Americans expected to be hospitalized with measles this year, or the one or two who could die, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
It isn’t the disease itself that takes the lives of mostly young, infant victims, it’s secondary infection, typically pneumonia.
But many state lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis believe we should have the freedom to not vaccinate our children and then send them off to school to spread and contract disease, just like in the good old days. Before there were vaccines, children and feeble adults regularly died of these diseases each year.
Here we go again.
There’s a host of lurid tales about why not to vaccinate kids. The granddaddy of them all, which has caused the most damage and spawn so many other lies, is that vaccines are associated with autism or causes it outright. No matter how hard the entire world has tried, this bogus story is impossible to stop.
But there are plenty of additional myths. Among the Facebook circles of the damned, legends perpetuate about measles plagues being faked. There are stories about docs secretly being in cahoots with Big Pharma, just to make cash from this. All of these fabrications suck in the weak of will and benighted of science. The quandary inflicts the ignorant who worry and figure, it’s better to be safe by not vaccinating. It’s as if vaccines were as elective as shoes that might someday cause flat feet.
But the biggest, most dangerous of all the loopy arguments is that, hey, it’s a free country and forcing people to do anything with kids is bad business.
That’s the argument Polis makes. He, and other misled state lawmakers mistakenly insist we shouldn’t force parents to inoculate their children. They say compulsory vaccine breeds more mistrust.
Nobody’s forcing anyone to do anything with vaccines. As a society, we must resume forcing people to inoculate their kids against contagious, deadly diseases if they send them to public school. We already force kids and parents to do all kinds of things while attending public schools. This, however, is not just another one of those things. It’s one of the most important things.
The problem educated, science-minded lawmakers have is that they know they have a grave problem here. They know that, “no thank you,” is irresponsible public policy and a good way to sicken and kill people.
They know HB 1312 is the worst of all ideas. It does absolutely nothing to get the dangerously determined antivaxers to inoculate their tots. All it does is make them fill out some paperwork — in person — if they want to keep sending their little viral time bomb off to school.
Paperwork.
These parents are willing and motivated to risk the lives and health of their own children and thousands of others because of propaganda and a myth. And lawmakers think inconvenience and paperwork is going to change their minds?
It’s like the Paris Accord, only you don’t even have to make a promise. Just check the boxes that say, “I don’t care if my kid gets sick,” and, “I don’t care if I sicken or kill other people’s kids with my idiocy.”
That’s it.
The inocularmists, however, are outraged even over this. They say it’s a conspiracy. Pustules, misery and death be damned, they’ll refuse to vaccinate their kids.
So there you go. Plagues of preventable diseases are headed this way, just as they are in other vaccine deserts.
The problem is too many kids without vaccine. HB1312 does not vaccinate more kids. Instead, it only allows legislators to falsely claim they did something about this looming epidemic.
If your child can’t be inoculated because of a danger to their health, be prepared to home-school your kid to keep them well and alive. If you have immune problems, get ready to be imprisoned in your house, possibly for months at a time, as the scourge makes its way through Colorado communities.
The clear choice is time-tested, safe and effecitve: either vaccinate your kid, or keep them home.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com