Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Bioethics Final Blog Post #1: Anti-Vaxxers

Penn & Teller Anti-Vax

With all due respect to avoiding dogmatism, how in the hell is this still a thing? Now I would never advocate mandatory vaccination for every child, as this would violate my beliefs on parent's rights and also work in direct opposition to my stance on population control, but I just cannot understand some of the reasoning behind this movement. Many of the arguments against vaccinations seem stripped straight from the crazy conspiracy theorist handbook. "Pharmaceutical companies only care about making money!" Ok...somewhat true. "And vaccinations are just another one of their scams to get your money." NO!!! It is completely contradictory for a company to sell you something that will last you forever. The money in medicine isn't in preventing diseases, but in treating them. This argument is completely illogical.

Yesterday I stumbled across this little beauty on Facebook. Well yes of course children have more vaccinations now then they did 70 years ago. Humans hadn't even discovered many of those diseases by 1940 or 1980, let alone a vaccination for them, and the increase in number for the ones already being issued is evidence of nothing except that the dosages being given out in previous decades proved to be insufficient. Mindlessly spreading empty propaganda like this has become the norm for modern anti-vaxxers, who conveniently left out any death or infliction numbers. We receive nothing about the effectiveness of the vaccines from this, nor does it account for the number of children that died of similar "unknown causes" that could be identified later as a preventable disease.

It is the smoke and mirrors of this topic that drives me the most insane. This type of non-scientific material is not being spread by professionals, but by illogical people with no medical degree. And as fear tactics so often do, it is working. Where oversight and inquiries into vaccination safety were probably initiated through goodwill and genuine concern, they are now likely propelled by the same enormous pharmaceutical companies trying to sell prescription drugs to treat the same illness that could have already been destroyed with a vaccination. Vaccinations are one of the greatest discoveries in human history, and yet we have allowed a small number of people to pit us against something that could save the entire race. It's not just asinine, it's ass-backwards. On a long enough timeline, if every human was vaccinated upon birth for certain diseases, we could potentially eliminate the human susceptibility to those pathogens. It might then be possible to stop giving the vaccines altogether, and then human race would just be naturally immune to Polio, or Hepatitis. It might also be just as likely that this system could cause entire populations of bacteria to starve into extinction with all human hosts now removed from their food chain.

It's actually almost funny, and somewhat poetic I guess, how easily global issues can be hidden behind microscopic scapegoats. 

2 comments:

  1. But how do you really feel about this, Zac?

    Penn & Teller? Did I miss something?

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    Replies
    1. Never mind about P&T, I didn't realize that was a link to their video.

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