"MY THOUGHTS ON VACCINES" - Lonsberry

Vaccines are responsible for most of the diseases of old age. Dementia, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, cataracts – all can be blamed on vaccines. And antibiotics. And municipal water and sewer systems. Those four things together – vaccines, antibiotics and municipal water and sewer systems – are responsible for the diseases of old age. Because they are responsible for old age. In the last 200 years, the average American lifespan has doubled. We have gone from something less than 40 years for most people, to something in the neighborhood of 80 years. It has been the most dramatic positive health change in the history of humankind. And it has paralleled the development of vaccines. At the end of the 1700s, it was smallpox. Through the 1800s, it was rabies, diphtheria and tetanus. In the 1900s, it was measles, rubella, mumps, polio, chicken pox and whooping cough. One by one, through the miracle of vaccination, as an answer to the prayers of millions of parents, the dealers of death were eliminated. Our children survived and our lives were lengthened. I was a child in the 1960s, as a great wave of new vaccinations pushed old diseases out of our minds and society. The infectious diseases of childhood – which killed two of my second great-grandmother’s sons one summer – faded and were forgotten. I was spared catching polio, but I suffered through both kinds of measles, and mumps, and was gravely ill with whooping cough. And as a young newspaper reporter, I knocked at the door of an Amish family whose 4-month-old son had died of that same disease. They knew a sorrow that millions of Americans have been spared – because of vaccinations. But today we question vaccinations. Our faith in them one more victim of a pandemic that was horrifically mismanaged by ignorant and arrogant politicians and public health officials. Incompetence on the part of doctors and elected officials shattered trust, and the mandating of a useless and ineffective covid vaccine destroyed the respect for modern medicine built up over a century of miraculous advances. The lecturing doctors suppressed our freedom and destroyed our prosperity, but failed completely in their fight against covid. Further eroding trust in the medical industry is its complete submission to progressive politics. Various professional organizations are nothing more than activist groups trying to use their medical degrees to legitimize political dogma, sometimes at the expense of their patients and society. On top of all that is a palpable arrogance that sees any questioning of medical infallibility as a rejection of science and a sign of mental or moral inferiority. Instead of seeing itself as the cause of growing public distrust, the medical profession sees the public as being to blame. The sad consequence of that is a spreading public skepticism for vaccines, most of which have been saving lives around the world for decades. Some of the resistance is a questioning of the science, an uncertainty about side effects, and the simple American resentment of being told what to do. None of those concerns is unreasonable, but people – especially parents – must be careful to keep them from becoming dangerous. Because some forces – including hostile foreign powers – use social media to plant and enflame doubts about vaccines with the specific intent of dividing and endangering Americans. Some people push anti-vax narratives online to make money, and some people are simply mistaken in their reasoning. The net impact is a significant reduction in childhood vaccinations. That might not have necessarily led to anything bad, except for something else that has happened in society over recent years – massive illegal immigration. In America, vaccination had largely eradicated many of the potentially deadly diseases of childhood. But when you let some 15 million people into your country, with no medical screening, from around the world, those people are bringing the diseases of the unvaccinated world with them. That put foreign germs in contact with unvaccinated American children, and we are starting to see the outbreaks and suffering now – outbreaks and suffering which have been mostly absent from our shores for half a century. Which gets us back to the issue of vaccinations. Just as we embraced them to our benefit, we can turn away from them to our hurt. That is a decision that we as families and as a society will have to make. I hope and pray that we will continue to vaccinate. Not the insane and ineffective covid vaccine. But the proven preventatives against the plagues and pandemics of an earlier day, which stole so many years from the lives of our ancestors. I have nine children and nine grandchildren. All of them are vaccinated, and all of them have escaped the childhood illnesses which sickened me and almost took my life. I pray every day that they are blessed to live into old age, and I know that because of vaccines and a few other hallmarks of medical modernity, they have a good chance of doing so. We all have a good chance of doing so. Unless we turn our backs on these medical gifts from God.