We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.