Sometime last year, quite by accident, Dawnise and I found ourselves looking at Edward Jenner’s house over his garden gate.
Jenner may not be a household name, none the less his work pioneering vaccination has literally – no hyperbole or exaggeration – saved countless lives.
Vaccination isn’t perfect. Vaccination isn’t infallible. Vaccination saves lives.
We know all of these things to be true beyond any reasonable doubt.
We know the last – that vaccination saves lives – because, in the immortal words of Richard Dawkins, “it works, bitches.”
Vaccination is science, which a wise magician described as, “a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence.”
“What’s left,” he went on to say, “is magic. And it doesn’t work.”
Along with millions and millions of other people, I’m likely alive because I’ve been vaccinated against a cadre of diseases that could have killed me in infancy. I got that far because my parents and grandparents were vaccinated against diseases they subsequently didn’t get.
Diseases that didn’t kill them.
Didn’t maim or cripple them, or change the course of their entire life.
The strongest evidence that vaccination works is that the diseases we routinely vaccinate against have become vanishingly rare.
Which is entirely the point.
They’ve become rare enough that most of us have never seen someone affected by any of them. Rare enough that some of us have the luxury of asserting they’re not even real.
We’ve succeeded in making these afflictions so rare that we’ve collectively forgotten that not so long ago tens of thousands of people contracted paralytic poliomyelitis each year. We’ve forgot what a hospital ward full of people in iron lungs looks like.
We’ve made them rare enough that some of us think, despite the evidence, that the risk of being vaccinated outweigh the risks of disease.
The universe, of course, doesn’t give a toss what nonsense you believe…
“Good news, everyone!”
Thanks to some of the physicians in charge of America’s vaccination advisory committee – like Dr. Kirk Milhoan – who believes that an individual’s right to choice outweighs vaccination’s public health benefits – we may soon have a chance to refresh our collective memory.
For the record, I believe he’s wrong. And I believe everyone – not just the people who follow his advice and “exercise their right to choose” – are worse off for having people like him in positions of authority.
I also don’t for a moment believe I or likely anyone can change his mind.
This isn’t objective, or rational. Therefore it’s not something you can change with evidence, or well reasoned argument. Assuming for a moment he didn’t get his medical degree from a box of Cracker Jack he’s surely seen the data. He’s surely studied the evidence.
And in spite of that, he’s values individual choice over collective responsibility and benefit.
Or perhaps he’s betting on magic over science.
He might as well argue that it should be a surgeon’s choice whether they scrub in for a procedure. Or that it’s a a city’s choice if it sepparates its sewage from its drinking water supply.
After all, the “germ theory of disease” is just a theory.
Of course theory doesn’t mean “personal unsubstantiated belief,” or even “someone’s wild-assed guess.” It means something is the best explanation we currently have – consistent with all the evidence we currently have – even – or maybe especially – when we don’t yet completely understand the phenomenon in question.
Doctors, of all people, should know this. Doctors are to scientists like engineers are to scientists – they’re the people who put the science into practice – use it to solve real problems. Use it to hopefully make the world better.
So it absolutely infuriates me that he has the nerve – the utter fucking audacity – to call himself a doctor and yet undermine one of the best tools we have to protect health by encouraging people in his care, who look to him for trustworthy guidance, to forgo the best protection science has yet developed.
<deep breath>
So be it.
As America chooses to turn its back on vaccination, no other country can force them to reverse course.
What other countries can do, and I believe should do, is work to ensure that their populations are protected from America’s choices.
One way a country might do this is by making evidence of vaccination against the diseases they routinely vaccinate their population against a prerequisite for entry.
The risks from an individual choice to be unvaccinated absolutely shouldn’t be imposed on others.
Want to cross the border into a participating country? Produce evidence you’ve been vaccinated.
Each time Dawnise and I have relocated internationally proof of vaccination against some set of things has been required as part of our entry paperwork.
During the COVID pandemic we demonstrated that it’s completely possible to scale those inspection mechanisms up to everyone traveling between countries.
Many of us don’t have ready proof of childhood vaccination. The straightforward answer is to get re-vaccinated.
Getting (re)vaccinated, managing and checking records – none of that is free. But the cost seem low, especially against stakes.
And I recognize that there are some people who really actually can’t be vaccinated. People for whom the vaccination itself actually carries material risk. I even know a few such people.
I also know there are a bunch of people who want to, and are often even allowed to “opt out” for religious or philosophical reasons.
To me the line is simple and clear – a bone-fide medical exemption permits travel, a religious or philosophical exemption does not. If your god or your philosophy preclude vaccination, they implicitly preclude international travel.
Because magic doesn’t work.