You’ve got to fight, for your right … to measles paaartay!
Thank you Don Harte of Corte Madera, for your rebuttal [“Measles Schmeasles!,” Feb. 13] to the articles that use fear, shame and guilt to justify taking away a parent’s right to choose to vaccinate or not to vaccinate their children. When I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, autism, asthma, diabetes and cancer were very rare and virtually unheard of for children. Most of us got the flu, measles, chicken pox, mumps and so on and lived through them just fine, and I never knew of anyone with any lasting consequences.
And, according to Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in an Associated Press story picked up by Fox News on April 2014, there had been no measles deaths reported in the U.S. since 2003. Nor have any deaths been revealed in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality weekly reports. Yet during the same 10-year period, the U.S. Government’s database report, called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), reports 108 deaths from measles vaccines.
If we all stand up for our right to know and freedom to choose the way we want to stay healthy—including whether or not we choose to use vaccines—we will be protecting a fundamental right we cannot afford to lose.
Elizabeth Lynne, Novato
If you want to refer to fundamental rights, then I refer you to the U.S. Constitution that cites as a basic tenet of our way of governing the promotion of “the general welfare” of the people. It is similar to a core principle in most religions and societies, also referred to as the “common good.” Choosing to not inoculate a child against a disease that has almost been wiped out neither promotes the “general welfare” nor the “common good” of the country. If you choose to live in a society whose principles include “general welfare” and “common good” then you have signed a veritable social contract which sometimes requires that you sublimate what you desire for yourself to what is best for those around you. You might not like it, but we would all be better off, if we recognized that we are members of a larger group.
gpt