Disproportionate Cognitive Dissonance

Ebola! Very hard to contract. Do EVERYTHING we can to stop it. Close the border. Cancel flights. Quarantine nurses who have no symptoms. Spend weeks covering it in an alarmist paranoid fashion. Kills ZERO people who contracted it in America because of our medical expertise. Ebola is a public health threat yells all of the bloggers. The govt needs to do whatever it takes.

Measles! Very easy to contract. Be asked to do the bare minimum by vaccinating your children for the sake of herd immunity and for the sake of community? Neva because CNN isn’t freaking out about it. Neva because freedddddommmmmmm and libertyyyyyyy. 102 confirmed cases in the U.S. so far this year of measles. A disease that still killed 18 people a day around the world in 2008 and there is still 20 million measles cases every year around the world. Measles, an actual threat, yells all of the bloggers is not a problem for my child. My son is safe because I say so. The govt needs to stay out of my life.

Your Kid is “Unprotected,” Ok?

You write: “For crying out loud, how on Earth did the modern human race survive for 200,000 years with such a sissy immune system?”

How did we survive? Well, very precariously. In fact, life expectancy just a century ago was in the 30s. The 30s! Life expectancy in Third World countries now have a life expectancy this low too. They don’t have a CDC, NIH, world-class universities who study bacteria, viruses, etc. They don’t have a stable state or infrastructure.

200,000 years ago? So, you are talking about the Paleolithic Era. That’s easy too: Life expectancy was 33 years old. However, if you lived to 10, you could live until your 50s. So many children died in infancy that this caveat is needed to understand the numbers. So many children died that this skewed the numbers downwards. You know how we have a term for a married person who has a spouse that died? Widow? Well, yeah, that’s because it didn’t happen as often so we gave it a category. Children died so often that we didn’t create a name for what you call a parent who has a dead children. It was normal to lose a couple of children while they are really young. Being an parent for MOST of history meant losing a child, or two. These numbers are estimates based on the bset empirical data around. The wealthiest of course lived longer because they were able to enjoy excesses and has the best shelter from nature. The worse off were REALLY bad off. The slightly better than worse off were REALLY bad off. Imagine living without painkillers, and a stable supply of food, and surgery without anesthesia.

Just look at the numbers that are freely available to view that the CDC has posted on their website. In 2008, 18 people every hour died from measles around the world. This is mostly in Africa where immunization rates are minimal. That is 164,000 people a year who die from measles! Are you getting this?

More data: The U.S. all but eliminated measles completely by the year 2000. Now, in 2014, we see a sharp uptick in reported cases. We have great intelligence and data regarding where, why, and how this is happening. It is from not enough children being immunized. This is called herd immunity. Immunization works when over 90% of the targeted audience – in this case, children – receive immunization. If the number is below that, it’s easier for any one child to contact. Go to Wikipedia and look up herd immunity. It’s there. This is all freely available online. Measles is REALLY easy to contract. In fact, I was listening to one doctor speak last night and she said that someone who has measles could walk out a room and 2 hours later, an infant could still contract measles.

You are compromising your child. You are increasing the risk of those children with weak immune systems, and infants especially, who are around your child or other children who aren’t vaccinated. Vaccinations for children should be mandatory. If you have concerns about what is in vaccines, there is tons of literature on them, miles of data, and pools of sources. I read a good book in my medical ethics class a couple of years ago called Autism’s False Prophets regarding an earlier scare regarding a vaccine-autism connection. The scare was perpetrated by a guy who is no longer an accredited doctor. He is literally banned from practicing. He made up data, and straight up falsified the study. But, as we know, myths are hard to kill and once info if out there is can never be erased. If you want to believe something bad enough, than you will.

Finally, why do you think you are qualified to say such nonsense? Literally, you don’t know anything about what you are talking about. Just because you think something doesn’t make it true. There are experts in anthropology, viruses, immune systems, vaccines, biology, neuroscience, and on and on who have dedicated their life to this. This sort of reckless behavior is borne out by privilege. We do live in a wealthy nation and it’s easy to forget just how many people have died and continue to die in this world due to viruses, bacteria, and other preventable deaths.

Your blog post is ignorant, dangerous, and unbearable.