Whooping Cough Is Running Around

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Oct 26 2015, 12:56 am

How MANY decades?

In the years of black and white television, and early, rabbit ear antenna color, no, there wasn't any whooping cough. I know. I was there. Your statistics conveniently start where the partisans want to start.

The other diseases weren't around either.

I did have chicken pox (I am still scarred) and mumps. The vaccines weren't available when I was young, that's how old I am.

Except one guy in my high school who limped around with a cane because he had had polio. The rest of us were fine. The polio scourge was before my time except for him. I don't know his story; we weren't acquainted. I just saw him limp by.

The "CURRENT" vaccine may indeed not be as good as the ones in the past; and there seem to be more than one strain of it now. But you will not deny that there is a context here of a miserably effective campaign to not vaccinate. Fortunately it is still fringe-y and weird, and confined to certain counter-culture-y zip codes but those also include some religious people and communities; therefore the shameful and agonizing article in the NY Post at the top of this thread.

The anti-vaxxers can't be excused even if there were other unfortunate factors operating. They are wrong on the face of it, and other factors, such as the difficulty of eradicating this disease NOW, do not excuse them.

Vaccinate, discriminate.

Or cough. The choice is yours. But it's more than a cold. You will be racked, vomit, in pain, for two months, and lose work, and perhaps emerge weakened in general and maybe with a permanently damaged speaking voice.

I repeat my earlier reference to anti-Western sentiments dating to the Beatles and their pretty Indian music and their interest in the Maharishi guru. That was all very interesting and pretty. Although some genuine Hindus were bemused at Western dabbling in what they took seriously as a religion and culture.

But Western thinking fell into disrepute and its strict rigorous scientific rationalism too.

These diseases - all of the ones that are coming back, measles, all of them - are back because of this distrust of Western rationalism.

It's vaguely religious; wicca like. You would have thought we would be safe, we religious Jews; was not Maimonides one of us, the great physician. The Jewish Doctor is a famous rigorous thinker.

Something got too green. I am all for high-fiber bread, but not vaccinating is going too far. That's too green and isn't green; it doesn't help the earth for people to cough. Although there are indeed some - Gloria Steinem said so just this week - who think there are too many people. "Human load on the earth" was her charming term. She isn't Jewish and .... has no children.

I wonder if a few dead babies are not so terrible to the reduce-mankind faction. Well, we are fourteen million people all told, most unmarried too, and we need all the babies we can get. (Yes, Orthodox are only ten percent of Jewry worldwide, and the others aren't doing much in the baby department).

Causing needless suffering is obscene.

Because of some Sixties hippies and an aging starlet.

Bad.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Oct 26 2015, 1:12 am

As for those anti-vaxxers who have "done their research" - genuine, no kidding, degreed scientists, and we have one professional immunologist, a vaccine researcher, here - have done "their" research, which isn't "theirs" but the real thing.

The pros all vaccinate, and HATE the anti-vaxx thing. We had such a tirade here, from a professional, one night.

The "research" has been carefully seeded onto the internet for non-professionals to find and exclaim over.

There was a campaign to specifically target religious Jews to not vax; it was some glossy magazine propaganda put onto Orthodox doorsteps, about a year ago. Targeting our population. To get us both dead, and hated.

Well we are, for now, neither dead nor hated, so let's keep it that way.

We are the People of the Book, not the People of the Germ, as in "my infant is ill and she was in a stroller near some of Those People at the store checkout, and ..... it's known they don't vaccinate for 'religious reasons'".

Charming. That is bittul Torah. Oh oh.