Saturday 5 September 2015

Anti-vaccination campaigners. Do they have a Taliban mentality?

I am tired of the unreasonable trendiness of the anti-vaccination campaigners who think that if they and their children live a healthy lifestyle then a disease like polio, which can be avoided by vaccination, will not affect them.

These unreasonable people do not, in the main, acknowledge that they are beneficiaries of "herd immunity" or what is now referred to as "community immunity".  They are on a level with the clerics in the north-wesgtern tribal areas of Pakistan where there are strong links to the Taliban which organisation has worked, and worked violently, to keep vaccinators out of the areas that they control.

Would the trendy anti-vaccination campaigners ever go as far as depriving communities of vaccination against polio and other highly infectious diseases that maim and/or kill? It is not beyond the realm of possibility - if they were assured they had the numbers.

What also irks is that they show a disdainful ignorance for the history of polio, particularly of those people still alive who contracted polio in the 1950s - those who have been crippled since childhood; those who have lived long enough to be affected by post-polio symptoms and illness.

For those who are anti-vaccination, I suggest watching the movie below.  It portrays what happens to one family who find themselves in the middle of an outbreak of diphteria.


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