Getting Serious Up in This Mutha’

I know that most of my readers to this blog aren’t really coming here for insightful commentary on politics or religion or world events.*  However, I’ve been spending most of the past week and a half in and out of doctor’s offices, mainly for a chest cold that’s been causing me to cough up all sorts of exciting things, but also to my GI doc to start crafting a plan to better address issues that have occurred “down south” during recent races.**  This immersion into an area where I (very thankfully) don’t normally have to venture has gotten me thinking about the whole measles/vaccination thing.

In reading through the information on the subject, which mainly consists of what friends are posting to Facebook, I think I understand why folks are fired up.  I get that some people prefer not to vaccinate their kids due to the link that they feel exists between vaccines and autism, and I get that in some cases, resistance to vaccinations comes from a place of faith or religion.  I also get that the people who vaccinate their kids don’t want unvaccinated children around theirs, and the recent outbreaks in places like Disneyland prove that this is a real issue.

To me, what’s not being said – and the reason I even bothered to post this in the first place – is the idea of a social contract.  As a society, we agree to do certain things in a certain way as our “price,” if you will, of being part of society.  For example, I agree that I’m going to drive my car in a way that keeps it inside my lane lines, that makes it stop at a red light, and obeys speed lays.***  Not only do these rules protect me; they also protect everyone around me.  If I don’t want to drive my car in this way that society has dictated, I don’t drive it at all, and if I’m caught driving in a way that’s not proper, I’m punished for it.

Take another example:  as a dual-income, no-child household,**** we pay a cubic a$$ ton in income tax (and in Arizona, both to the state AND the federal governments).  Sure, we complain about it, but that’s our price of being part of society; even though we don’t actively benefit from several of the entities that receive our taxes, it’s our job to pay them.  For example, since we don’t have kids, we don’t directly benefit from the taxes we pay to public schooling, but we do benefit indirectly from having a more educated society, from having employment for teachers and other school staff, and from having a place for consumer goods companies like pencil makers and textbook publishers to peddle their wares.  All of these things make our society better, and so, we pay our taxes to keep them going.

To me, not vaccinating a child is a violation of this social contract.  By not vaccinating, you are risking not just the health of your own child, but also the health of all of the people with whom that child comes in contact.  Measles has clearly not been eradicated as a disease, and there’s a reason schools at many different levels require MMR vaccinations.  There are kids out there who can’t be vaccinated for whatever reason – too young, too sick with other conditions, and so on – and we need to help protect those children until they’re able to be vaccinated as well.

Certainly, I’m not a parent of actual human children, but I have “children” that I have to vaccinate, or I face fines from the city/county/state and limitations on what we can do with them.  Since the dogs have aged, we’ve stopped vaccinating them against certain things, like kennel cough, since we don’t board them in kennels.  However, if we started taking them to kennels again, you better believe we’d start that again, both to protect them AND the other dogs boarded there.  If we didn’t vaccinate them against rabies, for example, and they became rabid, they could easily infect another animal who couldn’t be vaccinated against it – a tiny, wee puppy.  And nobody wants to think about a tiny, wee puppy with rabies.  Holy crap, that’s sad.

Really, the bottom line for me is this – children that aren’t vaccinated and are at an age where they should be don’t get to go to places where they might encounter a child who can’t be.  This means theme parks, playgrounds, schools, and even more common locations like the grocery store.  If you don’t abide by the social contract of society, you don’t get the perks of it.  That’s the way it works here; you pay the price of being part of society and you get the benefits.  If you opt out of one, you opt out of the other.

Now, if it actually comes out in a widespread sample of studies verified by the appropriate sources that vaccines are linked to autism,***** then we need to have another discussion about this as a society and a nation.  However, until that point, that’s my feeling on the matter. 

Later!

Amy

P.S. – Please feel free to chalk this post up to being heavily medicated on cough syrup and steroids to clear up the muck in my chest, as well as not having very much going on right now, event-wise.  Hopefully, more interesting/funny/engaging posts to come in future weeks!

* Or insightful commentary on anything at all, really.  I’m not fooling myself.

** More on this topic later.  I’m sure it’s highly anticipated by all of you.

*** Well, okay, goes no more than 5-7 miles over the posted speed limit.  Whatever.  You get the point.

**** 100% our choice, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

***** As opposed to a MILLION other things that could be contributing to the rise in autism rates, including issues in our food supply and just plain better diagnostic tools and knowledge about autism itself.