Let's not make Coronavirus about "Anti-Vaxxers"
Jennifer Schmid
I'll never forget several years ago when my son, then four years old, got a case of croup that landed him in the emergency room. For whatever reason the virus had caused his airways to close up, and he could barely breathe. By the time we got him to the ER, his O2 sats were down in the low 70s. That means that he was only getting about 70% of the oxygen he needed in his blood for his body to function properly.
When we first discovered him in his bed, gasping for air, we knew immediately that we had to take him to the hospital. No time to call 911 and wait. It was not a time to try homeopathy or herbs or sit with him next to a steamy shower. The poor kid couldn't breathe. And it was one of the scariest moments of my life.
But that's the miracle of modern trauma medicine. I knew that when he got to the hospital, they would immediately hook him up to oxygen and give him a breathing treatment to help open his airways, and he would be ok.
However, when we got to the hospital, the emergency room physician started grilling me about my son's vaccination status. I looked him in the eyes and told him point blank, “This is not the time to lecture me about vaccines. We can have that conversation once my son is breathing again.” The physician glared at me but started attending to my son in the way that he should.
After about 45 minutes, my son was able to breathe normally again, and his O2 sats were back up to 100%. To the credit of the physician, he came back and apologized for bringing up my son's vaccine status and for lecturing me when my son urgently needed medical care. We then had an educated conversation about the almost impossibility of my son coming down with epiglottitis due to Haemophilus influenza B (HiB) at the age of four. (Epiglottitis – inflammation of the epiglottis in the back of the throat – is a rare complication from HiB and can be fatal if not treated immediately.)
I share this story with you because we find ourselves facing a pandemic believed to be caused by a virus for which there are no vaccines available. This can be really scary for people who rely on vaccines as their sole method of disease prevention. Ultimately, this is about 90 to 95% of the first world population, and 100% of the mainstream media, who prey on the fears of those 90-95% of people.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media is starting to use COVID-19, the disease by which they're calling this outbreak, as a rallying cry for mass vaccination for illnesses for which we do have vaccines available. There were multiple headlines this week -- very threatening headlines if you ask me -- turning this whole thing around and blaming “anti-vaxxers” for the current and future health ills of the world.
Chronic Disease is the “Bad Guy”
Really, this serves no one. If anything, coronavirus should teach people that relying on vaccines as the sole method of disease prevention doesn't serve the general public. We were woefully unprepared as a society for dealing with a mass illness that has a higher mortality rate in those who are already facing chronic disease, especially our elderly population. It’s the chronic disease piece that is killing people, because their systems are already weakened by both the disease and the pharmaceuticals they take for those diseases.
Instead, we should be using this challenging situation as an opportunity to get sugar and processed foods off of the grocery store shelves and silence the sugar lobby, who has so much power that they stopped the former First Lady, Michelle Obama, from criticizing their products when she wanted to make fruitful change for the children in this country.
We should be using COVID-19 as an opportunity to encourage people to take positive lifestyle actions like exercising 30 minutes a day, building strong social support mechanisms, turning off their phones, getting adequate sleep, and spending time outdoors.
And we should be using COVID-19 to change the agricultural practices in this country away from GMO corn, soy, sugar beets and canola to real foods using rotation that replenishes the soil, rather than pumping it full of chemical toxins that poison our bodies.
I have yet to hear or see one mainstream media article or one “public health” expert talk about the importance of nutrition, sleep and exercise during this crisis. Not one. No one from CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Fox News, a major newspaper, the CDC, or the NIH has stepped forward to urge people to start making empowered healthy choices from here on out, to give up their reliance on ice cream, Netflix and their phones. All they talk about is “social distancing” and hand hygiene and “flattening the curve.”
No one can deny that at least one pharmaceutical company is going to make billions of dollars on a coronavirus vaccine that will sacrifice safety and effectiveness for soothing the fears of the general public, just like the H1N1 vaccine in 2009. And we all know that the new coronavirus vaccines will likely be mandatory for everyone, even for those who already test positive for titers.
This is not the time to vilify yet again a small segment of the population who has decided that it is not in their best interest or their family’s best interest to make vaccines their sole method of disease prevention. Whatever their reasoning, whether that be a previous bad reaction to a vaccine, or an autoimmune disorder that makes vaccination dangerous, or the philosophical and scientific belief that illness builds a child's resiliency into adulthood when things like coronavirus come along, the judgment needs to stop, once and for all.
We are better than this. Let’s focus on solutions, not blame. By working together, we can re-create a better world for everyone.
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