Vaccines are good, ignorance is bad
no photo, only links to research and a works cited
How many of my dear readers have done extensive reading on vaccine science? Not the kind of reading you get from casual Google searches where the results are pulled from a database of your own personal algorithm, but a full on read from peer reviewed journals, legal case reports, and intense, extensive data pulled from a variety of sources on vaccine distribution. In my line of work the latter is actual research where the former is, uh, willing acceptance of propaganda. I have spent all of this fine morning doing actual research and the first draft of this, which existed last night before my morning of deep reading, had a much different tone. A blasé, incredulous attack on anti-vaccine sentiments that I’m known for in my personal life. But after doing some real deep reading and actually looking at the sources, many of which are understandably focused on the recent Covid vaccines I can actually say that undeniably all y’all anti-vaccine fuckers are ridiculous and are leading to our inevitable death by infectious disease that awe have taken great steps towards eradicating.
Did anyone really think that I’d succubus to dumbass anti-vaccine ideals with the wealth of research we have on vaccine safety and effectiveness? It’s not even hidden or implied or tenuous, vaccines are great and the one of the few things that unequivocally lends itself to the alleviation of human suffering. It astounds me that there are any anti-vaxxers in the year of our lord 2024 and it astounds me further that anyone could ever tolerate someone who proclaims doubt on vaccines in any way.
Public health, specifically vaccines, have been on my mind as news has been pouring out of the waterfall that is wannabe dictator Donald Trump’s various picks for his presidential cabinet leading into his inauguration early next year. RFK Jr specifically takes the spotlight as one of the more heinous picks with his history of accusations of being a weirdo and general bad guy. There is a lot to unpack about him, so much that I won’t dedicate this piece to that undertaking, but his positions surrounding public health serve as an excellent jumping off point for the state of this entire mess surrounding vaccine scepticism and public health atrocities.
Vaccines cause autism is a rallying cry for the anti-vaccine movement, a motto that lives and breathes at the heart of anti-vaccine culture whether everyone in it believes that statement or not. There is an orbiting subculture surrounding vaccine side effects and the precise chemical makeup of vaccines as being cause for concern, but it almost always turns back to the autism argument. Which is an insulting farce from beginning to end. Even taken at face value the implication is that it is better to have a child, paralysed, living their days in an iron lung until an excruciating death than to have a child with autism. It is better to have a child stacked in a mass grave filled with victims of tuberculosis, tetanus, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, than an alive child with autism. In other words, a dead child is better than a disabled child. Vaccines don’t cause autism though. There is no evidence of any kind that suggests that vaccines cause anything other than mild side effects and immunity to dangerous diseases. I’d cite sources but there are literally too many and there is only one article that proposed a link between autism and vaccines. That article was found to have terrible research methodology and was retracted from publication along with the author being punished. Yet the damage lingers.
The real risk to disabled folks in regards to vaccines is a lack of public vaccination. Disabled people, especially folks with compromised immune systems, rely on herd immunity to stay safe and keep living, yet as more people decide against vaccines the risk to disabled people grows nearly exponentially. Vaccine denial is rooted, deeply, in ableism, both the philosophy and the practice. At every turn the decision not to get a vaccine sends a message that a dead disabled person is worth less than unproven concerns over bodily autonomy.
A lot of these concerns have festered recently with the rapid release of the Covid vaccines, an mRNA vaccine that is paving the way for research into the new vaccination variety that shows heaps of promise in combatting the rise of anti-biotic resistant diseases and viral mutations. Public health, outside of the obvious, is intimately tied to climate change and our own willingness to blindly accept medical misinformation as medical fact. We face new challenges, like Covid-19, and we need new solutions like mRNA vaccines. The myth is that there is little evidence to support the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines. I want you, dear reader, to go back and read that second word again: myth. MRNA vaccines do have heaps of research behind them, but they also have some side effects. But those side effects are completely within the margins we see with other vaccines and none of them proved to be fatal. Research also found that side effects were more common in people who already had conditions relating to the relevant side effects. But as someone who had near-lethal Covid I can say, with full confidence, that I’d rather feel a bit off for a few days than have Covid that bad ever again. The inability to breath well, the conflagration level fever, days lost to spinning hallucinations, the inability to eat or drink water, the secondary infection leading to months of pain and recovery. A jab and some uncomfortable days are far more preferable.
That’s what keeps me up at night. Not to sound like a skipping record, but really, knowing that people would rather potentially die than be uncomfortable astounds me. Knowing that people value death over disability astounds me. The precedent is dangerous for folks like me who already face intense rhetoric, from political leaders and the public, about how disabled people are better off dead than living in society.
I think about the paradise pre-disabled people must live in, where the decision to not get vaccinated and not vaccinate their kids and not worry about herd immunity vaccination rates is just so casual. Where they don’t have to think about their society, just themselves. It extends beyond vaccines, of course. Pre-disabled people are always the first to claim disabled people need to find different solutions even as they vote away the already pitiful current ones. They’re the first to pretend we can ignore politics in interpersonal relationships even as their choice for politicians directly make disabled people’s lives worse. They’re the first to look the other way as disabled people struggle to access daily essentials that they take for granted even as they support access to those rights taken away.
Vaccine denial is but a strand in the web of privileged takes on the many ways fortunate people can excuse and enjoy the mass deaths of people they dislike.
We have some solace in knowing that Trump, a broken clock, is against the rollback of the polio vaccine and Republicans in general are hesitant to give space to any anti-vaccine rhetoric from RFK Jr. Again, broken clocks, but at least some topics happen during one of those daily periods. But the public health concerns do go further than vaccines.
Fluoride is a hot topic as it is infused into public water for the sake of better dental health. Some folks have a problem with it and claim it is unhealthy, which yea, it is. If you ingest spoonfuls of just fluoride. The amount of fluoride in our drinking water is no where near the levels needed to cause a human harm. It’s not even near the levels of fluoride found in toothpaste. It’s also found naturally in water, so much so that high-fluoride areas are known to have people with extremely healthy but stained teeth. We also already have several real world case studies on what happens when fluoride is removed from public drinking water. You know what happens? There are more dental related problems.
The most disappointed aspect of my persona surprisingly isn't the disabled part of me, which is constantly told that it doesn’t matter and should disappear in the eyes of the public, but the educator side of me. I have spend, currently spend, and will spend countless hours teaching students how to conduct good research. How to vet sources and be aware of by-lines. How to understand rhetoric and discern between reliable sources and junk ones. It feels overwhelming and it sounds like a lot, but even in today’s over-saturated market of junk ideas it really only takes a bit of brain power and some habits to keep handy when being presented with information.
It feels like I, as an educator, am losing to a group of proud anti-intellectuals who encourage folks to take pride in a lack of literacy and blunt acceptance of propaganda. It feels like no matter what I do, no matter how well I do my job, no matter how good my research is, that the idiocracy will flourish because it’s easier to believe lies that satisfy the ego and fuel hate for folks that make certain demographics feel uncomfortable.
I’d also like to point out, as a closing thought, that the people who are calling for an end to vaccine mandates are generally unaffected by the fallout of those decisions. The rich, the powerful, the politically corrupt can always have free and easy access to vaccines. If they get banned in the States they’ll have a doctor loyal to them administer it in the comfort of their home or they’ll just take a vacation to a country where medical science is better supported. But the poor, disabled, and marginalised will have no such access and will suffer the consequences.
Get vaccinated. Read a book written by a disabled author. Drink water with fluoride in it.
Works Cited in no particular order
Brandi R, Paganelli A, D’Amelio R, Giuliani P, Lista F, Salemi S, Paganelli R. mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19 as Trailblazers for Other Human Infectious Diseases. Vaccines. 2024; 12(12):1418. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines12121418
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/379813/WER9950-eng-fre.pdf
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/measles-pertussis-mpox-are-vaccine-preventable