by George Sibley
I’ve been following the recent vaccination debate – if that’s the right word – with some growing confusion. I’m a believer in vaccinations if I don’t think about it too much. But, of course, I think about it too much, and I find myself wandering off into the swamps of ambiguity that seem to surround all the issues we get stirred up about in America.
The positive case for vaccines is self-evident to those of us who were kids before Dr. Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Fear of polio – fear of a life immobilized in the dreaded “iron lung” ventilator – haunted our summers. When I was about 12, a girl who lived just a few houses away in the neighborhood died of polio. We stuck dimes in slotted cards for the “Mothers’ March on Polio” – the March of Dimes initiated by the polio-stricken FDR. I think it was our first “post-war war,” the war on polio. Then our hero Dr. Salk came out with the vaccine; we all lined up in school gyms for shots, and almost overnight, it seemed, polio disappeared (at least from public consciousness). The March of Dimes then declared war on the varieties of measles – and won that war, too, with vaccines. The measles’ nastier, more aggressive and deadly cousin, smallpox, had been on its way to eradication since discovery of the cowpox vaccine in the early 19th century.
I never had polio – to the best of my knowledge anyway; most cases of polio were little worse than (and probably mistaken for) a bad flu; only a small percentage became debilitating. But I did have the measles as a boy, both kinds, along with nearly every kid I knew. Measles did not generate the same fear as polio, even though occasionally someone died from measles; for most of us, after a couple of seriously sick days it was just a legitimate reason to not go to school for a while.
Still – who could object to inexpensive treatments that make a person immune to even the relative inconvenience of measles – let alone the risk of the iron lung? Well, quite a few people, apparently: people who either trust entirely in Jesus to keep them well, or don’t trust the government that wants to eradicate the diseases, or don’t trust the pharmaceutical corporations that make and profit from the vaccines, or all of the above. Those arguments seem to reflect merely a mild level of paranoia, although one does wish they were themselves the recipients of any consequences of their beliefs, rather than it being a case where the paranoia of the fathers is visited on the children. The children are, of course, somewhat protected by being surrounded most of the time (with rare exceptions like the Disneyland situation) by what epidemiologists call “herd immunity” – a phrase I don’t particularly like having applied to me, but here I am.
At the same time, I am a little amazed at the extremes of vehement righteousness that have emerged on both sides of the expanded issue. On the one hand, we have legislatures considering parental “bill of rights” for the anti-vaccinators, essentially turning children into a form of private property. And on the other hand, there’s a self-righteous media assault on the anti-vaccinators. This aggressive drawing of lines in the cultural sands seems to suggest some deeper underlying issues. Are parents who refuse vaccination necessarily bad parents? Are those who choose to vaccinate vacating some essential human right? Is there a “civic obligation” to participate in vaccination?
These reactions do get me to thinking, and I find myself mulling over what really constitutes “the greater good” for our society? The anti-vaccinators seem to be taking a stand for the personal freedom to make their own decisions about what constitutes “the greater good,” while the vaccinated seem to be advocating for a social good that requires the participation of everyone to succeed; both conceptions of the greater good seem very American, reflecting the tension between personal freedom and a democratic society.
But I do find myself wondering about the social good advocated by the vaccinated. Including me. We seem driven by a belief that a disease-free society is both possible and a big part of that greater good. This seems to be as unquestionable as motherhood and apple pie: who would challenge the goal of a disease-free society? We have warred against smallpox, polio, the various measles, the mumps, and won – they’ve been declared eradicated as epidemics. In the developed world we have controlled typhoid fever, dysentery and other epidemic “social diseases” caused by polluted water. We continue to wage war on the varieties of cancer, heart disease and the deteriorations of mind and body caused by old age. We have branched out to include the social eradication of bad habits that can kill – notably smoking.
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We do have setbacks – new strains of tuberculosis and other mutating bacteria that current antibiotics can’t touch, and mutating viruses that render this season’s flu vaccines irrelevant. But we struggle on and are not discouraged. We believe (don’t we?) that the end of all this will be the opportunity, the inalienable right, to live for as long as we can stand it. Time magazine’s 2015 “Health Issue” (Feb. 23) has a picture of a wide-eyed baby on the cover, tagged “This baby could live to be 142 years old.” Does it go too far to suggest that the unspoken end of this striving is to be vaccinated against any form of “untimely death” – with no delimiting definition of what constitutes “timely death”? You may laugh at that, but where do we stop in trying to save and extend our living bodies?
Even as we give our dimes and dollars to these death-defying efforts, however, we find ourselves confronted by another set of problems. These problems include the inevitable depletion of cheap and easy resources (i.e., “sweet crude” oil), the pollution of vital resources (water and air), carbon-driven changes in the planetary climate, a growing climate of political chaos in the un- and under-developed nations of the world – the list goes on and on.
When we are asked about the common underlying cause for those problems, most of us quickly respond: too many people. There is certainly at least a superficial truth to that – and why do we have “too many people”? I read a doctor’s estimate that the eradication of smallpox in the 19th century has resulted in half a billion people alive today that would not otherwise be here, generations of offspring from people who would otherwise have died of the pox over the past two centuries. Infant and youth mortality is dropping globally; average life spans have increased by decades just in the 20th century. And vaccination has been a contributing factor in all that good news – which of course leads to the bad news of all those problems caused by “too many people.”
You might argue that the problem isn’t just too many people, it is too many people who want too much and are undisciplined in the getting of it; true enough. Politicians and economists and religious leaders show us, with charts and graphs, that we could in fact decently feed, shelter and clothe all of the people alive now, and even more – if we would make that the priority for our sense of the greater good, and adapt our political and economic systems accordingly.
We are in fact seeing a positive decrease in the rate of population increase globally (although the numbers keep increasing), and we see occasional forays here and there into political limits on numbers of children, but no really sustained international programs beyond educating women where that is even allowed. More locally, Central Colorado is anticipating close to a doubling of the population by mid-century – mostly from people migrating in (from New England as well as Old Mexico). This not really something that is stoppable.
What will we do with them all? The still anemic recovery from the economic trauma of 2008-2009 suggests that we are approaching the point where our political and economic systems will break down under the pressure of too many people. In our own country, supposedly the richest nation in the world, we cannot provide everyone with meaningful work (and burger-flipping and bed-making are not meaningful careers) – and if we could, the additional buying power those people would have in our current consumer economy would just further devastate our remaining resources and accelerate changes in the climate.
Can we resolve the challenges presented by too many people? Of course we probably could – if we could muster the same enthusiasm for population control or economic reform, or both, that we can muster for the wars to vaccinate ourselves against all of nature’s natural controls. Abandoning vaccination and leaving it all in the random and mysterious hands of God may be the alternative for the anti-vaccinators. But we the vaccinated don’t seem willing to pursue more rational alternative aggressively, and thus we may be putting the cart before the horse in terms of social responsibility.
George Sibley thinks too much in Gunnison, where he mostly thinks about water plans these days.
