Religious Extremists Fight Vaccinations
According to some religious extremists, the greatest threat to the souls of their children is not drugs or television or even rap music. The most dangerous element of the modern world to getting their children into heaven is, um, vaccination against disease.
[Warning to educated people: The following could make you crazy.]
The latest battlefront in the religious Right's war on common sense is the assertion that many childhood vaccinations, lifesaving though they may be, were originally developed on fetal tissue and thus desecrate their children's bodies in ways that Big Macs, Coca-Cola and heroin can never do. The polio vaccine known as Poliovax, manufactured by Aventis-Pasteur, is derived, they say, from the MRC-5 fetal cell line, which comes from a 1970 abortion. Vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, hepatitis-A and chicken pox are also "abortion-tainted" according to Debbie Vinnedge of Children of God for Life.
Sometime this year, according to the World Health Organization, we may see the world's last cases of polio. The horrible disease smallpox, once the killer of hundreds of thousands, has been eradicated since 1980 (except in bio-weapons labs, that is). When I was a kid, I remember the polio cases, those crippled or living in iron lungs, and my mother's warnings to stay away from public swimming pools due to her terrible fear of polio. Today, we are free or nearly-free of these terrors thanks to the efforts of science, medicine and education, and the effectiveness of childhood vaccinations. But the emergent class of hysterical science-phobic maniacs now threatens these advances thanks to superstition.
A friend of mine who's a mathematician, who grew up in a developing country and is not very tolerant of nonsense, reminds me that "primitive cultures always find reasons to shun vaccines." I explain to her that this is happening here, in Kansas, in Florida, in Texas. "Oh," she says quietly.
[Warning to educated people: The following could make you crazy.]
The latest battlefront in the religious Right's war on common sense is the assertion that many childhood vaccinations, lifesaving though they may be, were originally developed on fetal tissue and thus desecrate their children's bodies in ways that Big Macs, Coca-Cola and heroin can never do. The polio vaccine known as Poliovax, manufactured by Aventis-Pasteur, is derived, they say, from the MRC-5 fetal cell line, which comes from a 1970 abortion. Vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, hepatitis-A and chicken pox are also "abortion-tainted" according to Debbie Vinnedge of Children of God for Life.
Sometime this year, according to the World Health Organization, we may see the world's last cases of polio. The horrible disease smallpox, once the killer of hundreds of thousands, has been eradicated since 1980 (except in bio-weapons labs, that is). When I was a kid, I remember the polio cases, those crippled or living in iron lungs, and my mother's warnings to stay away from public swimming pools due to her terrible fear of polio. Today, we are free or nearly-free of these terrors thanks to the efforts of science, medicine and education, and the effectiveness of childhood vaccinations. But the emergent class of hysterical science-phobic maniacs now threatens these advances thanks to superstition.
A friend of mine who's a mathematician, who grew up in a developing country and is not very tolerant of nonsense, reminds me that "primitive cultures always find reasons to shun vaccines." I explain to her that this is happening here, in Kansas, in Florida, in Texas. "Oh," she says quietly.
posted by Nittacci at 8:03 AM
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