Oklahoma Republican state rep. Kevin West held an informal meeting on vaccine safety last month that quickly drew jeers from the pedigreed multitudes of the Medical Establishment, including this statement from one Larry Bookman, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association:
“Before vaccinations were readily available, thousands of Oklahoma’s babies, children and adults suffered from dire complications from serious diseases such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever and polio. The reason this is no longer an issue is because America’s childhood immunization efforts are one of the most effective public health programs in history…
“Despite the effectiveness of these life-saving vaccines, there remains a vocal, misinformed minority who are working to chip away at this essential program. With this in mind, I’m calling on our state leaders to embrace the facts regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. And, on behalf of our nearly 4,000 physician members, I encourage parents who are nervous about vaccine safety to have an open, honest conversation with your family physician,”
I would say that if Bookman here wants to talk about honesty, he should practice what he preaches. There is no vaccine for scarlet fever, and he, as president of his venerated institution, should know.
It is significant for our understanding of the cause of the dramatic decline in infectious disease that there was never a vaccine for scarlet fever in wide circulation. The disease was a feared killer up until the early 20th century, racking up a body count far higher than even smallpox. Yet, by 1940, scarlet fever had virtually vanished in the United States and England. And now, in the present, when someone contracts scarlet fever, it manifests as nothing more than a benign sandpaper rash that lasts less than a week.
How? Why? Haven’t we been told that vaccines saved us from the ravages of infectious disease? That this this greatly-feared infection burned out in such dramatic fashion should be grounds for intense historical interest. But it isn’t.
If there was no vaccine in use, how did this killer disease, feared for centuries, suddenly vanish within the span of 60 or so years? The answer lies in the myriad sanitation movements that arose in England and the United States in the mid- to late-ninteenth century. Clean water, nutritious food, innovations in plumbing, an awakening to the benefits of handwashing and general hygiene. These were things hitherto never given the time of day. The power of hygiene is illustrated in the graph above. It dealt a mortal wound to a feared, invisible killer that had previously wiped out entire families, cutting through communities, and sending nations into panics. The most dramatic decline in mortality appeared in children under 1 year of age.
No one learns of the sanitation movement in school today, despite its enormous historical significance. It is lost history. In its stead, we have acolytes and propagators of actual misinformation like Larry Bookman, and the seemingly endless drones just like him who mindlessly parrot all the same phrases when defending the cult surrounding vaccines.
