Vaccinations are good.  Right? 

Polio, Measles, Mumps, Influenza, Pertussis, Tetanus, HPV, Meningitis, Chicken Pox, Hepatitis A, and Hepatitis B are all diseases or illnesses people can be vaccinated against.

And while half of them sound like the names of upper echelon Italian fashion brands, it’s no joke to gloss over the fact that these vaccinations are very important. 

Polio, for example once ravaged the United States.  Polio destroys the nerve cells in people’s spinal cords and can affect their ability to walk or even breathe on their own.  In the nostalgia inducing 1950s, polio paralyzed 15,000 people per year until the first vaccine was distributed nationwide in 1955.

So, yes, millennials, you can leave the “wrong” generation you were born into and head back into a time when smoking was “healthy,” segregation normal, television screens were the size of Iphone 5s, and oh, here’s some polio to sprinkle onto your kids while we’re at it. 

It is a fact that the science supporting vaccines is correct. Just because some mother’s goat yoga instructor told her something she read on a web forum, we have measles outbreaks again. Welcome to 2019. 

The Anti-Vax movement has been around as long as vaccines have. But never has it been as bad for public health as it is now.  

Now, everyone has their own really pea-brained reasons for not having their children or themselves vaccinated, but no matter the reasoning, those people are wrong.

Let’s start with scientific skeptics. Some people think that vaccines cause autism or have dangerous amounts of mercury that will poison their kids. False.

There is no other way to put it. No reputable scientist has claimed or proven that vaccines cause autism. This conspiracy theory was promoted by British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who helped publish a study in the Lancet that falsely linked the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to bowel disease. 

Wakefield then went on to speculate that vaccines can cause neuropsychiatric diseases, more specifically autism. Wakefield continued to make these claims and he actually made MMR vaccination rates plummet in his native UK and the United States. 

Wakefield, however, forgot to mention in any of his writings, that he was being payrolled by lawyers representing parents whose children had autism. 

Long story short, Wakefield was banned from practicing medicine in 2010, but the damage was done. Anti-Vax fever had spread to the US of A. 

Secondly, there are also  people who would rather forgo their children’s vaccinations than having the government tell them what to do. These people aren’t even attempting to be scientific. Most of them aren’t even against the science. They just see endangering the health of their children as a badass way to get back at the “big bad bureaucrats” in Washington. 

The other problem is how local governments don’t do anything to actually stop this. Exemptions from vaccines are available in some form in every state. So at the flick of a wrist people can endanger not only their child, but potentially dozens, or hundreds more. God Bless America! 

Measles, an absolutely miserable and PREVENTABLE disease, was spread to 78 people and counting in Washington and Oregon after an unvaccinated child with measles came in contact with fans at a Trail Blazers game. If a person isn’t vaccinated and is exposed to someone with the measles, there is about a 95 percent chance that person will get the measles. 

The outbreak has cost the state of Washington tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to contain the outbreak.    

All of this could have been prevented by a single shot. 

Hopefully,  parents of vaccine exempt children have their Ouija boards ready because that’s the only way they’ll be communicating with their children.  

The internet has also played a significant role in spreading Anti-Vax falsehoods. Conspiracy laced claims, spread by NON MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS sweep through social media like, well, measles. Imagine spreading peanut butter on bread, but your peanut butter is measles. Yum. 

Thanks to the internet, people would literally walk into the fires of  hell as long as they have their “essential oils” by their side.

On the internet, Anti-Vax “advocates” have made wild claims on Twitter, Instagram and  Reddit.

One anti-vaxxer posted: “If vaccines are so healthy, then why can’t you pour them into spoons and eat them?”  

Well for starters, Einstein, if my nightly salad is so damn healthy why can’t I blend it into a pulp and inject it straight into my bloodstream? Because I can’t. It’s not rocket science. 

Another Twitter user posted, “Healthy young child goes to the doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes -AUTISM. Many such cases!” That Twitter user is now the president of the United States of America. Enough said.

So the moral of the story is: future parents of Cal High, get your children vaccinated,because your child will probably  contract some absolutely archaic  preventable disease.