Well, not intentionally, but there is a reason to think that anti-vaccination ideologists could hurt women more than men, amongst other damage that they can do. I finally had a chance to listen to a recent “This American Life” that dealt with, amongst other things, an outbreak of the measles in San Diego that was caused by parents refusing to vaccinate their kids because they’ve been fed and believe the misinformation about how dangerous vaccines are. The show is sympathetic to the parents who are caught up in this panic, since obviously they’re the same Whole Foods-shopping, over-anxious yuppies that make up the audience and staff of “This American Life”. The reporter understands how you want to control everything your kid eats or is exposed to, and how obsessed some parents get with the concept of purity in their kids’ input. (Which really is completely understandable, since you are what you eat.) Though I do have to wonder why the same people who refuse to trust the FDA, the CDC, the AMA, their own doctors, a multitude of scientists, and the entire medical community when it comes to vaccines happily trust a cardboard box at Whole Foods that says that the item inside is organic. If the FDA won’t or can’t control vaccine safety, then why on earth would they be able to ensure that organic food really is organic? There’s a darkly funny moment on the show when the initial quarantine announcements warned people who shopped at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that they were in the greatest danger of exposure.
The San Diego measles outbreak is being shrugged off by anti-vaccination cranks because everyone survived it. They got lucky, because if the trend of not vaccinating your kids continues to grow, the next outbreak will be a lot bigger, and the chance of fatalities will go up dramatically. But, as “This American Life” demonstrates, just because all 11 kids who got the disease survived doesn’t mean that what happened was a small deal. First of all, measles is a miserable, serious disease, and kids run temperatures so high that it could cause brain damage. (Ironic, no? After all, the cranks claim the vaccines cause brain damage, which they don’t. However, many diseases we vaccinate against do in fact cause brain damage.) On top of that, the health department was only able to contain the disease (which could have easily infected a lot of small babies that haven’t had the MMR vaccine yet, as well as kids who have been unfortunately born to gullible anti-vaccination parents) by imposing a quarantine. Every kid who hadn’t had the vaccine yet and was exposed was subject to a 3 week quarantine, and that includes kids whose parents were completely innocent, because they were planning to vaccinate when their babies got old enough.