Study! I love to study. A pot of coffee, a comfortable chair and a deadline that isn't today — nothing makes me happier than to dive into a subject, stacks of books around me, obscure databases on the screen. It's perhaps the most appealing aspect of my job.
One day, I'm digging into the circumstances behind Oscar Wilde's famous line about the Water Tower ("a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it" — not a quip, as commonly described, but premeditated provocation). The next, I'm exploring solar eclipses (if you are ever stumped as to where helium was first detected, remember helios is Greek for "the sun," where the gas was noticed spectrographically during an eclipse in India in 1868).
So study is good. However. I also know that "study" can be a code word for wanton dismissal of facts that don't serve your personal narrative, and I'll give you an example. If someone says they are studying the Holocaust, trying to determine what really happened, then you can be sure you are not dealing with a scholar, but an antisemite. Your immediate answer should be along the lines of: "Well, I hope your 'study' involves reading a few of the thousands of meticulously documented books outlining the precise enormity of the crime, you odious bigot. Sticklers for bookkeeping, those Germans were. Fifteen minutes in a library should lay it out pretty clearly."
With anti-vax advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. up for the role of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, whose spine occasionally stiffens before going soft again, warned that nominees hoping for Senate approval should "steer clear" of undermining the polio vaccine.
Prompting a classic weasel response from Katie Miller, RFK Jr.'s transition spokesperson.
"Mr. Kennedy believes the Polio Vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied," she said.
Proper study! What a good idea. Let's look into it! How about taking 1,349,135 children and submitting them to a blind trial at 244 test areas around the country, with half getting the cherry-red vaccine, and half a placebo, or nothing. Then we'll really find out if this vaccine is any good.
Oh wait, we did that. In the spring and summer of 1954. To this day, it's the largest medical experiment in United States history. Thousands of doctors, nurses, principals, teachers, parents and other volunteers banded together, working for free — the government wasn't paying because that smacked of socialized medicine.
Gosh Neil, you might ask, being yourself an inquisitive sort, just like me, why did thousands of doctors, nurses, principals, etc., all supposedly with busy lives, drop everything to help run this giant medical test for no compensation? Possibly because polio was scything through their children: more than 57,000 cases in 1952, with over 3,000 deaths. A child could be healthy at breakfast and dead by dinner. That catches the attention of the neighbors and dials up public spiritedness.
To continue reading, click here.
 |
| International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago. |
An unsaid, but horribly grim side of this proposed "study" is that a large portion of the control group of children will die or be crippled for life. For what?! To say "yes, the vaccine is effective - no one died in the test group compared to x number of dead and paralyzed in the control group that didn't get vaccinated"? We already did that! The terrible cost has already been paid, this "study" would amount to senseless murder.
ReplyDeleteThose who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do study it are doomed to watch helplessly in horror as it gets repeated by ignorant morons with power.
And once you “recover” from polio, it comes back if you live to be older so you can spend your declining years in a wheelchair. Unable to walk as one of my friends is experiencing
ReplyDeleteQ. Who did Jonas Salk first inject with his polio virus?
ReplyDeleteA. Himself!
Q. Who did Salk then inject with his virus?
A. His wife & children!
That's how safe he believed it to be!
Salk is without a doubt one of the most important & greatest men of the 20th Century. He flat out refused to patent the vaccine, liking that to patenting the sun!
And if Brain Worn Boy & his equally insane minions ever bring up that mistake that caused about 50 people to develop paralytic polio, that was not the fault of the vaccine, but a mistake by Cutter Labs in manufacturing it.
https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/polio-vaccine-cutter-laboratories-berkeley-15961438.php
You mean, "with his vaccine."
DeleteThanks for the correction, brain freeze!
DeleteHappens to the best of us.
DeleteWe always used to say “the truth will set you free,”but it has been hard to believe that in our fact-free world now. Thank you for the facts!
ReplyDeleteThe events of the last seven days have really worn on me.
ReplyDeleteWe've had a school shooting, the gunning down of a CEO, four billionaire "news and media" owners who have given over one million dollars to a precedential elect after demanding their media empires refuse to be critical of the president elect during his campaign, the conviction of a member of the FBI for lying about a president and his son's illegal gift from a foreign company, the owner of a multi-million dollar government contract and director of an "efficiency" group within some odd section of the incoming administration being investigated because of his ties to foreign nationals AND his inability to have top secret clearance because he's a security risk, the refusal of an octogenarian democratic leader (who is recovering form a broken hip over seas) to be open to working with a younger and popular 30 year old democratic rep in favor of a septuagenarian cancer patient, a president elect who has literally gone on TV multiple times admitting that he both lied and can't deliver on his campaign promises BEFORE he's even taken office, and rouge drones flying all around everything east of the Mississippi... just to name a few.
AND the only one news story that is garnering change is the CEOs murder.
The algorithm has won. The propaganda has won.
1984 and the animal farm are our realities, and the people who were supposed to protect us from it, are helping to speed up our transition.
We won't make it to 2028 will we.
I think it’s worth clarifying that Alexander Smirnov was an FBI informant, not an agent or on the staff.
DeleteWhere did you come across a case of a healthy child dying from polio the same day?
ReplyDeleteIn the clips, though I should have said "seem healthy at breakfast." They already had the ailment. Remember, polio is a paralyzing illness. Typically, the symptoms present themselves over a few days or weeks. But it could also build, hidden, and present itself when someone stops breathing and dies.
DeleteThe 1918 flu pandemic was very much like what Mr. S. was describing. Someone could be healthy at breakfast, be sick by lunchtime, and then turn blue (literally) and be dead by nightfall.
DeleteThe disease had the highest mortality rate among young adults, including military personnel. Not kids. My wife read a very detailed non-fiction account of the Spanish Flu pandemic, just before our own Plague hit, and she delighted in describing all the similarities while we hid in our house for eleven weeks.
I was five years old in 1952, and about to enter kindergarten. That was also the era of tonsillectomies, and even that freaked my mother out. I spent two weeks in a Murphy bed. And while that was happening, I was I also worried sick (sorry) about the threat of polio. Pretty heavy stuff for a five-year-old.
My mother was scared shitless. She constantly worried about my getting overheated or tired...and ending up crippled for life. Or dead. I heard enough details about iron lungs to know about them and to be terrified of them, and couldn't stop thinking about spending the remainder of my days staring up at a ceiling.
It was a hot summer that year, and we lived in a third-floor West Side apartment, under a black tar roof. And nobody had air conditioning in 1952. Just big window fans to blow the stuffy air around. Ours was called an Air King. Every time my mother heard a siren, she would say that someone was either being rushed to a hospital because of the heat...or another kid had been stricken with polio. And there were a LOT of sirens that summer.
Most of the Holocaust survivors have died off, which will allow history to repeat itself eventually. And roughly 11,000 Boomers are joining them, every goddamn day. When all personal memories of polio are gone, America...and the rest of the planet, can enjoy it all over again. If it hadn't been for the polio vaccine, there would have been more iron lungs in America than Volkswagen Beetles. RFK Jr. needs a nice ride in a rubber truck, to a cozy rubber room.
Back in the late 1990s, I was on a business trip to San Diego, and added a half-day to my trip to visit with an old Chicago friend of the family who had moved out there some years back. It turned out that she was now working for the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and she invited me over there for a tour.
ReplyDeleteShe was never one to brag, so when I arrived, it took a while to glean that she didn't just work there; she had been Dr. Salk's assistant up until his death in 1995. They thought so highly of him that they had left his office untouched. She and I looked over his office and his papers in silence; it was like a tomb, or a memorial, in the best possible way. She steered my attention to the back of his office door, and there was his white lab coat, hanging right where he left it. Somewhere I have a photo of her, touching the sleeve of his coat with a bit of reverence.
I lost touch with our friend in later years; I don't know if she's still with us, which is too bad, because she could probably tell us exactly what Dr. Salk would think of all this. It would not be pretty.
Ben Franklin wanted to vaccinate his son against smallpox but his wife was against it. Their 4 yr old son died of smallpox and Ben Franklin never forgave himself (and some speculate this soured his marriage, as well... ya think?).
ReplyDeleteWe're already at a critical point in regard to measles vaccine. Vaccination rate is now 93% and a vaccination rate of 95% is needed for herd immunity. In 2000, the US declared it had officially eliminated measles, but that's no longer the case. Measles outbreaks will likely become a 'thing' in the next few years. Measles! I never imagined this becoming a public health crisis again.
one last comment.... even though vaccines will remain accessible to those who want them, that doesn't necessarily mean they will continue to be covered by insurance plans if the gov't deems them 'optional'.
ReplyDeleteMy late father-in-law was a polio victim, he spent a good several months in an iron lung in 1954. He was a young father of two and by all accounts, a healthy man, until polio got him. The lifelong results of this was learning to walk with two canes, never being able to get out of a chair by himself, partial paralysis of his shoulders, using a wheelchair if going more than a short distance and, although he was able to work again at his office job, he was convinced he was passed over for all promotions because of his physical condition. In addition, it contributed greatly to shortening his life, passing away at only 55. Yep, I get very upset with these fools and don't understand them in the least.
ReplyDeleteA marvelous column!
ReplyDeleteDefector.com had an excellent column about this:
ReplyDeletehttps://defector.com/what-the-fuck-is-a-vaccine-skeptic
Money quote:
"A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They're the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob."