Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, rabies was ravaging the fox population in central Europe, but they managed to almost completely stop the spread by dropping thousands and thousands of severed chicken heads from helicopters.
These weren’t just your ordinary decapitated chicken heads, though, these ones had been injected with the rabies vaccine, so we basically tricked foxes into getting vaccinated.
It sorta feels like we’re back in the ‘80s right now, because when I was reading the recent news that a buncha kids in Niagara have the measles, I had to check my calendar to make sure I hadn’t fallen through a timewarp portal. When I was a kid nobody had measles. It was this thing we heard about that older generations had to deal with, but which had largely been eradicated for us Millennials.
But like Atari games and vinyl records, all these retro things are suddenly back and popular again, including retro diseases like the measles.
In an excellent interview laying out the measles situation for Village Media, Dr. Dawn Bowdish chalks the measles outbreak up to a paradoxical chicken-and-egg situation: people aren’t getting vaccinated against the measles because they think measles isn’t very serious or pervasive, but the reason measles isn’t serious or pervasive is because it was eliminated years ago by those aforementioned vaccines.
I think there’s some validity to that argument, but I also think the bigger issue here is a general pushback against vaccines, thanks to the pandemic. Vaccines and vaccine mandates became a major issue during the pandemic, and a large section of the public has since been convinced by misinformation on the internet to think that all vaccines are bad.
And look, I don’t wanna be that guy, but at least part of the blame here belongs at the feet of our various governments, who bungled the messaging around the virus during the pandemic numerous times.
It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time, during the initial outbreak of the virus, when our public health officials told us not to wear a mask. Only to turn around a few weeks later and tell us that we must wear a mask.
Then they told us the virus absolutely definitely did not come from a shady laboratory in China that was doing experiments with viruses, and that anyone who even suggests such a thing is a dangerous nutjob. Then the CIA, the most powerful intelligence agency on the planet, says that a leak from a lab in China is “the most likely source of the outbreak.” That said, the CIA conclusion is highly speculative, and is driven by Trump's agenda. It was also out there years ago, in the first Trump administration, with the same "low confidence" caveat it carries today.
In any case, when our governments appeared to get so much wrong about Covid during the pandemic, you can start to see how someone would look at that and perhaps give a second thought about the measles vaccine.
Which isn’t to say that’s right. Just because the government messed up a few aspects of the pandemic, doesn’t mean they are wrong about everything to do with public health. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, especially if the baby is covered in small, red, highly infectious welts, and would land near other babies.
I think you should give your kid the measles vaccine, and I think vaccines in general are a good thing. But if you don’t get them, I also think that’s your choice. You’re not making a particularly good choice, certainly not from a public health perspective, and likely not for your kid either, but I’m just saying, I get it.
I don’t love the fact that some misinformed parents will choose not to get their kid vaccinated against the measles, which potentially spreads measles to my kid, but I do love freedom, so I guess that’s the price we pay.
So like the 18th century humorist J. K. Jerome once wrote, “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.”
James Culic got Covid once and it wasn’t that bad because it took away his sense of smell and made changing his daughter’s poopy diapers much more tolerable. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or go vitriolically viral with a letter to the editor.