By TOM RAGSDALE
Los Alamos
As someone worried about my safety, I wonder that Ms. Wissinger would condemn me, someone with a weakened immune system through a genetic disease, to accept that “Life itself is a big risk,” and tell me to “coddle” my “fragility.”
I don’t have a choice in being more at risk to epidemic-prone illnesses we had broadly eliminated through sound science before a celebrity whose only notable talent was having large breasts weighed in. Would you tell the people in the hospital you visit while carrying mumps to just deal with the risks of life? They shouldn’t have been old or gotten sick in the first place. What were they thinking? Would you tell the pregnant mother you contaminated in the grocery store who loses her baby to a disease that hasn’t been relevant for nearly a century to just stay out of public spaces?
Are you so proud of being an un-vaccinated health hazard, risking the lives of anybody who isn’t at the peak of health, risking them to an anachronism no less, that “I’m not part of the herd!” is justifiable?
Ms. Wissinger worries that driving on the roads is as risky, but a choice, as avoiding vaccinations is risky, but a choice. Unfortunately, walking around un-vaccinated is in this context more akin to driving drunk than simply getting on the road. Your lack of biological defense is an active detriment to public health for the previously explained mechanisms of immunity, much in the same way that knocking back a dozen or so drinks leads to a similarly ill-advised decision that it’s totally only a couple miles, I’m good, I got this.
One of these displays of poor judgment is actually illegal in public, though happily so long as your vehicle does not leave your own property, you’re entirely welcome to your conviction that the tree on the left is the fake one and will get out of your way.
The right to completely avoid public spaces is farcical at best. In fact, I invite Ms. Wissinger to demonstrate it comprehensively. No? You mean it’s not reasonable? Well, maybe we should look at the accusation of “extremely risk-averse.” Seatbelts? Those have strangled people! We shouldn’t wear those. I mean at a minimum there are actually documented cases of a seatbelt *in this reality* becoming wrapped around a child’s neck and leading to death, which is a fair sight more than the documentation of harmful effects of vaccinations on those without pre-existing conditions contraindicating them. Airbags can detonate improperly and break facial bones.
Suddenly, I wonder if Ms. Wissinger isn’t the one who shouldn’t stay off the roads. And let’s not even go into how fire extinguishers contain carbon dioxide, a chemical known to cause asphyxiation! Obviously since it could be bad, that means that any chemical or element with a harmful form as a possible configuration (but not present) in vaccines must also be horrid. Shame on all you mooing researchers and doctors who actually studied these things for understanding the difference! Or cause and effect! The herd of knowing your own limitations is just for those sober people, gimme the keys!
The observation that we are part of the human herd from birth is no more useful in the misinformed and scientifically illiterate decision to avoid vaccinations than it is to justify statements like “one more for the road, they knew cars are dangerous!” and “seatbelts are just for bad drivers.” Observing that we’re a social species does not confer any magical ability to resist epidemics, unlike, say, the real ability of fostering immunity to diseases that tend to kill us in job lots.
If you want to be stupid, you absolutely have every right to it, but please have the no-longer-common courtesy to do it well away from everybody else, so you’re not part of that herd you want so little to do with. Failing that, at least drop us a telegraph from the locales stacking dead bodies like cordwood from the trendy diseases of 1920.
