chicagodads

From where I sit, our country is divided over a lot of different issues. Pro- v. Anti-. You name the controversial subject, we’ve got some kind of war going on, whether it be abortion, living wages, extension of government, illegal immigration, the death penalty, health insurance, gay rights. As Wilco put it succinctly a few years ago, we’ve even got a “War on War”.

But one of the more scary ones for me is tied up with this notion that we should not allow our children to become vaccinated (or at least with certain vaccines) because it doesn’t really lessen the chances of them catching the disease and yet raises the risk of leading to autism. The alternative in this no-win situation is that a mass group of children will not take necessary vaccines and all of a sudden we have the Second Coming of Polio coming down on us like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

So, in a sense I am glad that a US special cases court has ruled against the vaccines-as-cause-to-autism group . Not that I know that they are right (I have a weird trust/mistrust issue with anything from authorities - specifically when those authorities exchange a lot of money), but this is a public health issue as well as a private health issue, and I’d rather that people not use my child as a guinea pig for their pet farms.

So, in other words, though I’m not sure about this issue, I can feel safe(r) picking a side. And maybe I can debate why that’s wrong or right another time, but Valentines is going to be a long day, and it’s already started.

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