Too many Southern Californians are running scared for their lives right now.
Tens of thousands of displaced, suddenly homeless residents of Altadena, Pasadena and Pacific Palisades after firestorms destroyed entire neighborhoods.
More than tens of thousands of housekeepers, gardeners and other workers keeping a weather eye not on the Santa Ana winds but for an ICE raid on their homes, their schools, their churches.
All of the many millions of us, actually, breathing the toxic air that comes after fires that incinerated not just wood and chaparral but plastics, lead paint, asbestos and churned it all up into the atmosphere.
I don’t know that there’s been a time in recent decades where the answer to an offhand “How’re you doing?” is, when you think about it, a “Not so good, thanks.”
I really don’t know why we should be burdened with more things to worry about.
The worry that I mean to add to our sad laundry list of them is the news that, thanks to the entitled likes of the wealthy Robert F. Kennedy Jrs. of this world — and of course thanks to RFK Jr. himself, especially if he comes to power as the secretary of Health and Human Services — our risk of catching and dying from infectious diseases that should have been permanently eradicated is now growing. Most especially for our children.
Even before the vaccine skepticism promoted by arrogant upper-class know-nothings grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, childhood vaccination rates were plummeting in our country, new data shows.
We peaked at the national vaccination levels for the most dangerous of childhood diseases around 2011.
“Nationwide, the rate of kindergartners with complete records for the measles vaccine declined from around 95 percent before the pandemic to under 93 percent last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” The New York Times reported this month.
“Immunization rates against polio, whooping cough and chickenpox fell similarly.”
Those percentage-point changes may not seem like a giant difference at first glance.
But all of us became somewhat expert at the concept of herd immunity during the pandemic. And going down to 93% begins to puncture the immunity we had achieved.
Much more dangerously for many communities around the country, the rates of vaccination are not at all geographically even. Idaho is below the 80% measles vaccination rate for kids, putting a whole generation at risk for a very serious disease.
Alaska and Wisconsin are below 85%, with Florida, Colorado and Oklahoma not far behind. California happily is in the sensible 97% range. Here, it’s mostly loonies in really rich enclaves such as Marin County who have caught the conspiracy bug that could turn into a real bug, the spreading of a virus that could kill their children.
But when you’ve got a potential health secretary at the lead of a reckless movement that 100% without evidence claims that childhood vaccines cause autism, and more broadly that the very modern medicine that has dramatically improved Americans’ overall health and life expectancy is somehow actually the cause of a made-up “chronic disease epidemic” — well, we’ve got a problem. And it’s a problem Kennedy’s propaganda, in or out of office, is making worse.
The public health is not political. The viruses that are easily protectable against don’t know who you voted for.
This is the one kind of big-government guidance that can and has protected us all. But because it serves their message of fighting the Deep State, some conservative opinion-makers have convinced those who listen to them that any advice that comes out of Washington, D.C. is bad for them.
Recent polling shows 31% of Republicans say “vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to protect.” Only 5% of Democrats agree.
How about this, Americans. When it comes to protecting your children’s health, and the herd immunity of the rest of us, why not try going to your physician rather than to your politician for advice.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.