An Angry Letter from Me to the Anti-Vaccine Activists

Hello Anti-Vaccine Crowd,

I’ll admit it, right off the bat, that I’m largely writing this letter as a form of experiment.  I’m testing the hypothesis that a human being can have their head jammed so far up their own ass that the person is then able to actually read this letter.  If this is illegible, it simply means that your head is lodged somewhere around the diaphragm.   If you can read this, congratulations!  You may very well be classified as the first living example of a Klein bottle.

Now, I realize that a lot of those terms might seem confusing to you.  Words such as “hypothesis” and “experiment” have probably never come up in your lives.  Don’t be frightened or confused (which do seem to be your normal states) – these are simply terms used in science.  That thing you tend to ignore in favor of your moral indignation and panic.  But don’t worry; there are literally thousands of people who are familiar with this term.  These are the people who have worked for much of their adult lives on the vaccines that have extended human life expectancy by a good thirty years.

Right now, I can tell that you are frothing at the mouth, ready to pounce on “all those so-called scientists” who, in your mind, are nothing more than corporate shills, trying to line their pockets at the expense of your precious child’s health.  And normally, I am pretty skeptical myself of pharmaceutical companies and big business in general.  However, this is one instance in which these scientists and businesses are doing the right thing.  Due to the efforts of the medical community, many diseases that once ran rampant in American society are now incredibly rare.  Polio is on the verge of being wiped out.  Please note the use of the word “verge.”  All of that good work can be undone pretty quickly if kids aren’t getting vaccinated.

Of course the big bogey man in this argument is autism.  That’s an easy fear to allay, if you are capable of critical thinking.  There is no causal link between autism and vaccines. It’s been tested and retested and retested.  Denmark conducted the most thorough examination of autism and vaccines and found no significant difference in the occurrence of autism in populations that were vaccinated and those that were not.  Scientists still have no clue what the real cause of autism is, but the reason for the massive increase in diagnoses is due to improved techniques for recognizing the condition.  A vaccine is very, very unlikely to alter the neurological system of a child.  Meningitis, on the other hand, could completely alter the mental capacity of a child, if the child survives.

I appreciate your right to decide what is best for your child, but what you’re doing is jeopardizing the lives of a lot of other children instead.  To protect the population from infectious disease requires widespread vaccination.  By refusing to have your children vaccinated because of pseudo-science, you are jeopardizing more than just your child.