laurawhiterivers

Dr. Jack Wolfson has been quoted by a number of media organizations about his views on vaccines. His quotation: “We do not need to inject chemicals into ourselves and into our children in order to boost our immune system,” Wolfson told Arizona Central in January. “We should be getting measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, these are the rights of our children to get it.

My thoughts after reading that:

In a natural system the pressures of infection and disease will drive the population ultimately toward adaptation, extinction or some razor’s edge in between. It is a dance of thrust and parry on a microbial and cellular scale that is won only by an organism reproducing its RNA / DNA first. That precious copy made before death is the finish line of the moment.

Life was not always so precious. In fact, much like George Carlin has pontificated – It’s not really precious at all.  Any Biologist with a bachelor’s degree will tell you that extinction is, quite frankly the RULE, not the exception.  Many animals demonstrate evolutionary coping mechanisms and behaviors in response to the ever looming death all around us; whether that manifests in laying thousands of eggs or a terrifying mother bear driving away danger from her cubs. It is difficult to say that animals find life to be precious and many of these familial bonding behaviors dry up when juveniles reach their own reproductive maturity (check for examples with your local biologist).

No matter though, because life became precious to us at some point in our species’ development many tens of thousands or hundred thousand years ago (you’ll need to check with your local Anthropologist for times and locations since this is a status update – not a research paper). There are known examples of medical treatment in ancient Neanderthal graves thus demonstrating an effort to preserve the body and it’s life within.  Offerings of flowers to the deceased in the grave have been recorded indicating an acknowledgement of death and the loss of an individual to the societal group.  Yes, they probably had feelings. But they also, very probably got measles, mumps, rubella, ecoli, pneumonia, prion related diseases and every other horrible tiny bit of bad news in a lipid bilayer, protein sheath or just a maliciously folded protein with the touch of death.  They got it all and then when they survived the dangerous business of being a child they were run through by bison while trying to get a burger, or carried off by saber tooth cats or just died in child bed, trying to make it to the precious finish line.

Society changed our views on the value of life.  But I’m wagering it was later than we all think. And to be fair, my desk is located in a Western country.  Check the news right now and you will find that life means very, very little half a planet or less away.  Here in this western country, I have an internet full of kittens, medical information, religious insanity, beheadings, sandwiches and porn, a phone book full of doctor’s names ( who has a phone book really?), and the expectation that I can check the internet to find out where my Doctor was educated and what their current “health grades” are.  I can use that internet to research anything that I want, without the very irritating requirement of using primary sources or peer reviewed documents.  I don’t really need an education to form an opinion – which is nothing new to the human animal in society. But what is new is the opportunity to spew your opinion to people who otherwise would never hear you, provided you have a keyboard and a good signal (please see above paragraphs for a shining example of such spittle).

Enter the anti-vaxxers only a short hundred years after modern medical miracles replaced all the old fashioned kind.  Remaining available miracles include understanding the synthesis and composition of DNA and Jesus emerging in burnt toast. BTW You can buy that toaster on line and make your own kitchen miracles. No waiting!

Among the Anti vaxxers ranks are celebrities, rogue doctors, ethnic groups who (understandably) don’t identify with the current establishment, and of course white upper and middle American parents who are trying very hard to do everything right according to their diligent (internet) research. This effort made partly because the lives of our individual children actually are precious. We only have one or two children anymore.  It is the odd couple that stops at five or six, and rare are the real women who can make ten or more like the old days.  Those miracles of estrogen are lost to another age or geography.  The anti vaxxers reject medicine to various degrees but I always laugh when they are taking supplements that are less well regulated than the prescription medication or immunizations that they reject.

Now to be fair to their argument, Big Pharma (whatever that means) makes mistakes.  Thalidimade is a quick example from a few decades ago (you can find others on an anti vaxxer website in your own time).  The method of science tests a hypothesis incrementally to substantiate or prove an outcome within a range (that is kind of abridged and naieve but works here) one test does not really prove much, actually. You need to build on a body of experiments’ outcomes, and have the ability to interpret many sets of results over time- sometimes decades and centuries all the while adjusting for the actual methods used in that era. Also the scientist or team member’s personalities will affect how things are published or when.  Medical science must have many more grey zones that other disciplines because you are dealing with the systems of a living organism, which in my shortsighted estimation is a muddier business than chemistry, physics or clean math.  The human body is amazing, the systems are breathtaking, interdependent and not at all guaranteed.  Ever. Not for thirty days, not for ninety days, not for a year, not at all.

At some point we forgot that there were no guarantees. We, in western society, started to believe that we could cheat the scythe with enough medicine, healthy eating and research. Understandable, considering that today Hp brand 3-D printers can use a cartridge of prepared cardiac cells to print portions of the heart for possible implantation. That’s amazing!!! Better yet, you can eat like shit all your life and just get some arteries replaced later on and still live to complain about Medicare.  Our ancestors understood, somehow, that their time was limited. Probably in the same way that the impoverished in other countries know such things.  Because death is all around them.

So, for argument, let’s say the antivaxxers win. All the Pharmaceutical companies become community gardens and every child is born under water with a midwife holding a videocamera (or an Iphone) and needles are used only for embroidering the precious name and weight in the memoirs.  Measles and Mumps will rapidly infiltrate our populations with every other little bit of tiny horrible that evolved long before we had an idea there was air to breathe above the water.  After a few generations people will broken heartedly cry out in their status updates “but we have to DO something!!!”  “All the children, they are sick and dying – just like the pictures of Sudan or Kenya or Appalachia (that’s in Australia, right?)”  “But we are not a third world country (read as “developing” if you harbor inner guilt for being American), we have Starbucks, and our gay people can marry, we have automatic transmissions and toy stores and clean water (do we?). We have GPS in our cars and watches, we have phones that can access all of the world’s internet (except of course North Korea).  We put tiny chips in our dogs and cats, we whiten our teeth and take supplements and go to the gym, we cleanse our COLONS for God sake!!.  Why is everyone getting sick and dying?

It’s because you fucks – you failed to tell the body what it needs to know in the language it understands.  We are made of CHEMICALS!! We are made of elements that have agreed to communicate chemically and become molecules, cells, tissues and systems. We have forced the growth of Medicine to such a degree trying to avoid death, that we have plucked a few apples off the tree. Vaccinations are one such reward.

Here is where I shit on everything I just wrote.

I announce all this safely wrapped up in the benefits of Western society, where we value the life of the individual and we care for children and the elderly.  Biologically, we emerged from the waters and the steppes where the strongest, smartest and sexiest lived long enough to reproduce. Keeping these diseases in check is just like a keeping lifer in prison with nothing to do but work out. Evolution drives development of bacteria and viruses (not technically alive, remember, but still pretty troublesome) just as it has us.  Evolution frames the dynamic change in a living system. RNA and DNA will find a way to replicate.  When we develop medicine and rely on it so heavily– we weaken the species.  If you are inflamed by the word weak, well, pick your own word than. One that means susceptible to disease, genetically compromised and possibly mentally unsuitable for life on this planet. Unsuitable for life in the Paleo environment. You know, where that Paleo Diet came from.

So what to do, what to do?

How about you just vaccinate your germy little kids and stop getting all your information from the internet and people whose medical credentials are too creative to be trusted. Understand that you probably don’t really belong here and in a natural system like the one you talk about on Sunday infomercials you would have been dead before nine of some horrendous disease. In the meantime one of your seventeen siblings would have given the world a copy of your “Y’ chromosome or mDna on your behalf. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH, because everyone else was dead by about thirty five or forty even as they ate pure – original Paleo diets and enjoyed “chemical free” living, without cleaners and additives and food coloring.  They were always exercising, because they were running from lions and hunting with spears, walking to get a drink – Paleo style.  No cancer or high blood pressure (not true BTW), cause everything was natural, like hemp, and peyote, datura, nicotine. Probably EVERY malady was treated with something like them. Dentists? Not a chance, thank you. Abscessed tooth getting infected? Find a grave digger and roll a blunt.

The unfortunate side effect to living in a society where you are not running from lions is that some people have too much time to think and an audience to spew their opinion to. Very much in the same spirit you found this essay; without much research, available on the internet and easily copied or transmitted.  Rather like a virus.