PERRY: Stop being polite about deadly quackery. Tell anti-vaxxers to stick it in their arm or up their ostium

You don’t have to look any further than just below the shoulder of millions of aging Americans to see how ridiculous Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax quackery is.

If you’re gray like me, you almost certainly have that odd little scar on the outside of your arm at your shoulder that is proof of the power of real science and public vaccination.

Anyone born even in the late 1970s and beyond doesn’t have the scar we all got from being vaccinated against smallpox.

That’s because it actually worked.

Smallpox was eradicated from every human on the planet, officially, in 1980.

Before then, about one in every third person who caught the intensely contagious disease died. As in dead.

Even before vaccine technology became as stunning as it is today, we all lined up to get our itchy scabs and then forget them for the rest of our lives.

Until now.

For the past 20 years or so, the vaccination rate for highly contagious and sometimes deadly diseases, like measles, has been declining among kids in school, which is the viral cesspool we all know and love that so efficiently facilitates mass breakouts of colds, flu — and now measles.

One of the biggest culprits for the decline in mass vaccination was Andrew Jeremy Wakefield. He is a debunked quack from Great Britain who falsely claimed he had proof that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, often called MMR, was linked to autism. His fakery got him kicked out of British medicine and into the United States. Here, he peddled the same quackery, eventually being exposed for his fraud here as well.

But the damage was done.

Tens of millions of Americans since then have backed off ensuring their children are vaccinated against deadly measles, and states like Colorado have fed into and accommodated the quackery and outright stupidity that led to the outbreak problem, Texas, and Kennedy.

Texas isn’t the only state that has leveraged moronic and malfeasant governance into a full-fledged public health disaster, but it’s a shining example of what the other 49 states must do immediately to prevent additional states of panic.

An Associated Press story this week diving deep into how any state in the 2020s could become a hotbed of measles turned up solid clues.

It turns out that health officials knew the vaccination rate among children was sliding over the past several years, but no one could persuade state lawmakers to adequately fund vaccine distribution and education programs to counter years of fakery and disinformation from anti-vax trolls and quacks.

For vaccine technology to be effective, at least 95% — at least — of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent the spread of viruses such as measles. Vaccine rates in Texas cities where hundreds of cases of measles have spread, and two children have died, have hovered at about 93%, and some even lower.

Voila! A nearly instant outbreak of a disease eradicated in the United States that has now spread to Colorado, where three cases have been reported, including one in Denver.

The problem in Texas, according to the Associated Press report, is that a large Mennonite community, which has long said “no” to vaccines, simmered the measles outbreak. Then the low vaccination rate just outside stricken towns lit up with measles cases like a gasoline fire.

Colorado absolutely could be next.

A story this week from Chalkbeat Colorado offers readers a look into their local school districts to see how well-vaccinated the children are at the local schools.

Cherry Creek schools? A marginal 94.5%. Aurora Public Schools? A scary 90.7%. Denver is not much better at 93.2%

But outstate is even far, far worse. The Elbert School district, southeast of the metro area? Only a very scary 76.3% of kids there have had the MMR vaccine. And in the Moffat 2 school district in southern Colorado, fewer than 60% of students are vaccinated.

Like Texas and so many states, Colorado lawmakers are complicit in the problem. With so many parents skittish about vaccinating their children, “just in case” the repeatedly debunked and absolutely false link between vaccines and autism might not be so false, the state allows parents to “opt out” of the MMR vaccine mandate just by saying they prefer not to opt in.

At one point, just a few years ago, it was easier for a parent to just go through the opt-out process than dig up the paperwork to prove their kids have had their shots so they can go to public school. Legislators now require parents to at least watch an educational video before just saying, “No, thanks.”

That’s it, though. Because some parents know so little about science and medicine, and they don’t have someone in their lives who persuades them to do the smart thing, the safe thing, millions of Americans, and Coloradans, face being scarred for life instead of just on a tiny place on their arms.

And just when the adults in the room figured this science-fiction nightmare couldn’t get any more dangerous, Americans re-elected Donald Trump, the king of calamity.

Trump decided to hire, as the head of America’s health system, one of the nation’s most prevalent and prolific medical quacks, Kennedy. He’s the very guy who not only drank vast quantities of the deadly Andrew Jeremy Wakefield poison propaganda Kool-Aid, he capitalized on it as a shady lawyer.

Even now, as he sheepishly tours towns in Texas devastated by measles, he mumbles to the public that, yeah, well, maybe vaccinating your kids before they get sick and die isn’t exactly the worst thing.

But he refuses to tell parents, definitively, that their children could get sick and die from measles if they don’t get the MMR vaccine, or they may infect other children who could become sick and die.

The answer here is so obvious and easy.

If you want your child to attend any public school in Colorado, they must have the MMR vaccine, or a valid medical exception, which are rare. If you want to send your kids to a public pool or rec center, or a day care, or a summer camp, they must have the MMR vaccine.

That’s it.

If you still disbelieve decades of science and undeniable proof about how effective and safe the vaccines are, and your real doctor can’t convince you that you should vaccinate your kids, then teach them at home. Let them swim in your backyard. You can go camping by yourselves.

But no parent should be empowered to risk the lives of millions of other children, and adults, because we choose as a community to politely accommodate someone’s neurosis and misinformation.

We don’t let kids take deadly guns and knives to school, so why would we let them take deadly diseases?

Fully fund public vaccination and education campaigns. Require parents to do the smart and right thing for their child and all the other children by reinstating real vaccine mandates. 

 Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com