Barrett Rainey's Second Thoughts

If you believe unvaccinated children should be allowed in public schools, you’d better stop reading right here and go back to your regular Faux Neus viewing ‘cause you’re not going to like what follows one damned bit.

Let me put it as simply as I can. Your unvaccinated child/grandchild has no God-given right to infect my vaccinated grandchildren. None. If your kid/grandkid doesn’t have a completed shot record in hand the first day of school, he/she should not be allowed on the bus. Period.

To see politicians running for any office teeter this way and that on such an important issue health should be a national embarrassment. The popular – but throughly unconscionable – practice of pandering to any given voter block by office seekers using mush-mouth answers on nearly any subject certainly is. On this one, is could also be deadly.

Watching Chris Christie wallow in the verbal swamp on this subject is embarrassing, though hardly out-of-character, for a guy who’s the only one who doesn’t realize his political career is nearly over. But Rand Paul is the one that disappoints most. First, because he’s a doctor. Second, because his response has been the nutcase echo of Michelle Bachman with this “I’ve heard of…” or “”someone told me…” B.S.. The man is a physician-by-training. He knows better. If he truly doesn’t, his medical career is just one bad diagnosis from landing him in malpractice court.

I’m old enough to remember measles epidemics. When I was in elementary school in East Wenatchee, two kids in my school died of measles. There were deaths in other schools, too. The vaccines at that time were weaker and usually given separately as opposed to the combination practice now. Even so, wise parents who’d seen measles epidemics in their lifetimes made sure their kids had the best protection – measles, mumps, diphtheria, etc..

Now, vaccines are much more effective. Medical and pharmaceutical professionals have better tools and more knowledge. We can protect nearly everyone from these once terrible diseases.

The right wing crazies continuing to peddle the fully discredited “research” of more than 30 years ago are putting their own families at risk if they practice what they’re trying to get the rest of us to believe. And if they ARE practicing by not vaccinating their offspring, then those kids should not be allowed to endanger the rest of us and ours.

Getting a shot of measles vaccine doesn’t mean a child can’t come down with the disease. Few shots are 100 percent. But, getting one can greatly decreases a youthful vulnerability caused by an as-yet undeveloped and untested disease-resistant human body.

Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted maxim “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts” is most apt in this current political dustup. If those who persist in peddling long-refuted, phony, right wing propaganda would adhere to the Senator’s dictum, there would be no “debate.”

If the right to your opinion truly ends where my nose begins – and it does – then your right to raise an unvaccinated child should end before stepping on public school property. And it does!

And one more thing. What does it say about our nation’s presidential campaign of 2016 that a childhood disease has captured the spotlight while truly urgent world affairs slide off the radar? Have the lack of common sense and an abundance of intellectually-vacuous political pandering become so pervasive in our national dialogue?

Are there vaccinations for those?

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