This is my second rant on Vaxing, but I feel I have to say it again--and more strongly.
The past two years of Covid 19 has given modern Americans, and everyone else in the world, a taste of what major epidemics used to be like. Of these, the Black Death in the 14th century and the 1918 Influenza epidemics are probably best known to us, because they were thoroughly chronicled in Western European and American society, but they occurred all over the world, nearly all the time. The introduction of measles and smallpox to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries virtually wiped out the lives of the indigenous people who had lived there for millennia. When outbreaks of an infectious diseases like smallpox or
cholera spread, people in their paths could only wait, hide and pray--in the nineteenth century, for example, newspapers might chronicle the day-by-day progression of an epidemic towards you, but there wasn't much you could do about it. You could wait to contract childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and chickenpox--your parents were probably expecting them to get you and to stoically nurse you through, knowing that in surviving them, you were immune from getting them again.
My generation (I was born in 1941) is probably the last to experience some of these epidemics. Sanitary conditions had certainly cut the rate of baby deaths and many of the risks of it to our mothers. We were immunized against smallpox and diptheria by then, but not measles, mumps and chickenpox. I got them all between the ages of 6 and 7. The only one I remember was measles. I came down with it at my grandmother's house, my temperature spiked at 104, and I became delirious. I was put to bed in my grandparents' bed (I don't know where they slept during the 3 weeks I was sick), and my mom camped out there too. I can remember having weird visions in the darkened bedroom. And all everyone could do was wait and hope. Well,
I'm still here. The following year (1948), I had rheumatic fever, and was supremely lucky to receive penicillin, just becoming authorized for civilian use.
As more immunizations became available, we rushed to get them. Everyone was vaccinated for smallpox at birth, but when I was in second grade in 1949, a foreign tourist came down with a case in New York. Everyone in my school, students, staff and kids, were marched down to the school cafeteria, and revaccinated. No questions asked. There were only 12 cases of smallpox that year, all in New York, and most occurring in the hospital where the carrier was. Since then, there hasn't been a single case in the U.S--and it's been wiped out worldwise since 1980..
In the early 1950's, prior to the Polio Vaccine, which debuted in 1955, polio came every summer; it paralyzed so many children--and Franklin Roosevelt too--and there were all-too-common photos of children limping along in heavy braces or encased in iron lungs to help them breathe. Public swimming pools, movies and anywhere kids congregated were closed down. I escaped going to sleep-away summer camp that year, and so avoided a situation in which several campers were infected, and one died. I played with my nextdoor neighbor the day before he came down with it and my mother had I fit. We all worked to save money and held fundraisers to contribute to vaccine research, and when it came, we all lined up with enthusiasm to get it.
The speed in which Covid 19 vaccines were researched and then made available--for free, has no medical precedent for such a major event.
I must say outright that I can't understand why anyone would not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19, or any other potentially fatal disease. Reliable scientific studies have revealed that since vaccines for diseases such as measles, diptheria, polio and numerous other infectious diseases have become available, the mortality rates of children under 15, which was historically averaging 46% until the middle of the 20th century (that for infants below the age of 1 was 26%) has been cut worldwide to 2% or less.
I've taken every vaccine I could get, because I can remember what it was like before this was possible. I haven't turned into Frankenstein or a crocodile, and my brain is wholly mine and functionally sharp. Why wait?
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An Article about Historical Diseases and Effectiveness of Vaccines: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/209448...
An article about the history of Child mortality:https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
