“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” screamed Chicken Little, yelling out that the sky was falling on our head.
Chicken Little is back, but now he’s yelling “The COVID vaccine is bad! “Don’t wear a mask!”
Mr. Chicken has also changed his name to “Anti-Vaxxer,” short for being against vaccines, the shot that will save us all, our only salvation.
He is shouting that the shot is harmful. Too many have listened to his ramblings before.
Several countries have given in to his ignorant tirades and allowed their immunizations to drop. The result was devastating. In 1974, Great Britain and Ireland cut back on their whooping cough vaccinations and immediately an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of whooping cough, or Pertussis, began. In the following three years, there were 36 deaths from the disease.
At the same time, Japan followed suit going with the naysayers, and cut back on their whooping cough vaccines. Shortly afterward, there were 13,000 new cases and in four years there were 41 deaths.
Anti-vaxxers are hazardous to your health.
The Russians listened to them in the ‘90s and the Soviet Union held back on diphtheria vaccinations. In 1989, there were relatively few cases, after the cutback on shots 50,000 people caught diphtheria. In four short years, 1,700 Russian people died.
Closer to home, by 2002 in the U.S. measles was completely eradicated, parents refused to vaccinate their children and cases of measles started up again.
A tactic of this bizarre movement is to it shore up with so-called legitimate studies, some are not so legit.
Recently a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, publicly criticized the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and started a protest movement there. He is the symbol of their mostly fake science.
An independent medical board looked into his publications and found that he had been paid by a law firm to falsify research to get money for clients. They immediately took away his medical license. Look it up.
There could be a few studies that show a minuscule vaccine problem, but put up against centuries of horrendous pandemics their paltry facts are a tiny drop in an ocean of pain.
O yea, they want their rights. I’ve heard of a lot of strange cults but never one that fights for the right to catch a deadly disease.
Now we come to the COVID Pandemic. The grim reaper is reaping away. The cases are in the millions, and it is bringing out the anti-vaxxers in droves. And they are dying in droves.
The latest statistic is that 99.9 % of all COVID deaths are those who were not vaccinated. This fact is obvious, it’s like saying that 99.9 % of people who jump out of airplanes without a parachute will die.
There is one truth about this. After centuries of preventing immunizations against deadly diseases, thereby causing countless deaths, anti-vaxxers have the audacity to justify their idiocy with some kind of weird science.
It is an insult to the millions of souls who believed their pseudo-science and died for it.
Shame on the anti-vaxxers and shame on anyone gullible enough to be taken in by these charlatans.
The only way you’ll get through this pandemic is to wear your mask and get every shot they come up with.
Don’t believe those Chicken Littles waving their signs by the road, they’re dead wrong, and could soon be wrong and dead.
Dennis Gregory writes a bi-monthly column for West Hawaii Today and welcomes your comments at makewavess@yahoo.com.