On Vaccinations

Veterinarian vaccinating a horse for meningitis, Fremont County, Idaho.  1940.

Every year I participate in the vaccination of hundreds of cattle.  My dog is vaccinated for diseases that dogs get.  The dear old cat, who lived a rough outdoor life in his occupation of slaughtering vermin, was vaccinated.

When I was a child I was vaccinated for various diseases as an infant, and then in school again.  I don't recall what all I was vaccinated for, but I know that it included measles, small pox, and polio.  

I was vaccinated for small pox twice more at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma and for polio twice more at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, as a soldier.  And the Army vaccinated me for Yellow Fever when I was a National Guardsman.  I've been vaccinated for Tetanus a time or two as well.

I'd get a COVID 19 vaccine today if I could.  But like most people, my turn will come much later, assuming of course like others who have to wait their turn that I don't catch it and die first.

That latter statement may sound excessive dramatic, or morbid, but I've known one member of my occupation who has died of the disease already and quite a few who are sick or have been.  We're waiting now for information about a colleague we've all worked with who went into the ICU a couple of weeks ago and that's the last news we received from him.  The last time that happened was when the member of our profession I've noted went in and then came out, weeks later, dead.

And then we get statements like those from a physician employed by the State of Wyoming who called into question the vaccines, referring to them as a "biological weapon", and suggesting that the Chinese and the Russians developed the virus in a laboratory in order to spread Communism.

When I was young my parents often mentioned how people lived in fear of going to swimming pools during the summer lest they contract polio.  They regarded Dr. Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, as a hero.

Jonas Salk.

Men of my father's age also looked back on World War Two, which he was too young to have served in but old enough to remember, and often commented on the "miracle drugs" that had been developed in the context of the war that saved lives.  The war was awful, but the resulting medical developments were often noted.

My father's war was the Korean War, and oddly enough a physician from my town, who had gone through one of the rushed upper educations of World War Two, and who served as a doctor during the Second World War, had also been a critical figure in the identification of Korean Hemorrhagic Fever, something that was always noted about that individual as an item of admiration.

As noted above, when I was of school age we were vaccinated at school.  I'm sure our parents were informed, and I do recall that one kid who was a Jehovah's Witness did not receive the vaccinations, but he was the only one.  Our parents were happy to have us benefit from what medical science had developed and spare us from potential agony from disease.  And certainly nobody in the shot line at Ft. Sill though anything about receiving an entire battery of vaccinations, including one for a disease that was already regarded as extinct at the time.

So what happened?

I really don't know, although I have my suspicions, and it plays a lot into what I've sort of lined out above.  My parents and their generation were personally familiar with disease, death and fear being a part of everyday life and had personally scene massive efforts to overcome disease in their lifetimes.  My mother, after all, bore the name of an aunt she'd never met who had died of the Spanish Flu.  There have been great medical developments since the 1970s, to be sure, and many are simply amazing, but the old diseases that arrived every year and took people seemingly at random are a thing of the past.  Somehow, therefore, we no longer look at this the way we once did, as dying from small pox or the like is like something out of the movies.

And in the interim years  the huge public health efforts that started during the Great Depression and were then ramped up due to World War Two and continued on during the Cold War have evaporated.  In an era in which we worried about 1/3d of the population being out of work, and then fighting the Germans and the Japanese, and then potentially fighting the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China science, engineering  and medicine was a big, big, deal.  When the Soviets faded, and even prior to that, that no longer was the case and we lapsed into an era and regard concerning  them that harkened back to the 1920s in some ways.  One that emphasized personal beliefs over such matters, as an individual conflict between the two didn't seem all that important really.  In other words, in a life or death struggle with a series of opponents, your personal views were still yours, and you could voice them, but they were likely to be subordinated at higher levels to national needs and you were likely to participate in that subordination.  When that pressure was off, the subordination was as well.  

In that gap, moreover, an interesting duality of the concepts of liberty developed.  First it developed with the embrace of the libertine in the 1960s but by the 1980s it was a conservative sort of libertarian concept that developed and they both exist in society simultaneously now and are often strongly welded together.  In many ways the left and right strongly unite and feed each other in this context.

So it'll be interesting so see where are now.

We're clearly an era of titanic political strife.  It an earlier era conservatives would have simply shut people who questioned taking a vaccine during a pandemic down, and liberals would have lectured them.  But in our current populist era this isn't the dynamic we're seeing.  The population needs to reach an immunity level of around 80% in order for COVID 19 to disappear.  We are somewhere around 10% of the overall population in that status, albeit temporarily as the immunity apparently wears off, right now.  That requires 70% of the population to be vaccinated.

Will it occur?  Probably not.

Nobody can criticize, or should even really inquire behind, individual health decisions, at least up to the point where they impact society as a whole.  Even while saying that, however, I'm baffled by how society approaches this over all topic.  People think nothing of having teenage girls vaccinated for HPV because they get the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and simply assume that people "can't not do it" will resist here. That's a massive societal assumption that is known to be false.  Indeed, mass vaccination for STDs was something that was only done on prostitutes in European societies before recently.  And people who vaccinate cattle and horses every year and are zealous about it will be abstaining in some cases.  Some who vaccinate Rover and Mittens and don't think twice will think twice here.

Beyond that, people have a gigantic acceptance of medications that actually don't medicate, but will in some instances avoid inoculation here out of fear over the vaccine.  Birth Control pharmaceuticals, for example, are enormously accepted society wide but are unimaginably dangerous as chemicals, being associated with severe health consequences and even psychological ones, and yet they're as routine as candy in our society, and this is but one example.  "Alternative medicines" of all sorts are sold as near pharmaceuticals when they haven't been vetted by the FDA at all.  Things like CBD Oil are now sold as cure alls and widely accepted as such even though they at best probably have no real impact on humans or at worst have negative ones.

And then theirs simply chemicals we know will impact health but which we ignore.  Alcohol and tobacco are well known for their risks and yet are widely consumed and accepted.  Marijuana, which has not been regulated for purity and impact at the Federal level as its listed as an illegal product, undoubtedly has risks of which we're unaware, but we're not worrying about it.

The point is not to tell people what they should to. This website tracks long-term trends as part of what it does.  And this is an interesting one. There really hasn't been a strong societal reaction to a scientific matter in the public sphere since the 1920s.  There was in that decade.  Our current decade is starting to look a bit like the 1920s in some ways, including the debate on scientific matters as social issues.  That's been developing since the 1980s, but this is the first time it's really been so evident as the event we're enduring is so dramatic.

On this site recently there's an item on Sacagawea.  If you read it all the way through, you'll note that in spite of the romantic wishful thinking of Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, the young woman, still in her 20s, died of "putrid fever", a bad way to go.  But people went that way all the time.  It was routine.  

Modern medicine made a death like that into a tragedy rather than a normality.  That actually gave us the luxury to debate something like whether or not individuals take vaccines.  The rarity of it also has put our relationship as a species to killer diseases out of context and few of us, and only the oldest of us, have a frame of reference to go from.  We're getting one now, but to what extent it comes into focus during a crisis, or after it, is an open question, particularly in an age as polarized as our own.