Rant #2,353: Wipe Out

Today is Friday, April 12, and it is the 102nd day of the year.

During leap years, it is the 103rd day of the year.

Hey, I guess it is great to have extra days tacked onto your year if you are having fun!

Did you file your taxes yet?

If you didn't, the time is coming for you to do your part in this yearly ritual, so get to it!

But we are a few days away from that deadline, so you still have time to procrastinate.

Let's look back in time a bit, way back to 1955. Heck, I wasn't even born yet, but let's go back to that time.

There were many dreaded diseases around then that could hamper, maim and inflict bodily damage on you, and even kill you.

One of these was polio.

Kids got it, were maimed for life, and at the time, it might just have been the most dreaded disease of them all.

It cut across all lines of humanity, and you might remember that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the disease, and was one of the many who worked through it and rose to the heights beyond any imagination.

But it was a horrid disease, in particular when affecting children, who were restricted in what they could do by their affliction.

Doctors had tried to find a cure for this disease for decades, but in the 1940s, a brilliant scientist and physician by the name of Dr. Jonas Salk got onto the case, and within several years, he and his team had perfected a serum that would prevent this dreaded disease from hurting anyone's life ever again.

That serum, administered as a vaccine, was declared safe and effective today in 1955, and it has benefited millions of people during the past 60-plus year to the point that the disease has pretty much been eradicated.

Now taken orally, the original vaccine and the oral vaccine are listed on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

Today, in 2019, we cannot possibly imagine what an impact the development of this vaccine had on the world. It prevented one of the most dreaded diseases from happening, sparing people terrible hardships.

I knew one person who actually had polio, one of my parents' friends who, unfortunately, had the disease way before a cure was found.

I knew him as a family man, a successful person who simply ignored his pronounced limp and went on with his life never giving into what he had.

He and millions of others did the same thing, but with the advent of the vaccine, people simply did not have to go through this anymore.

Now, bringing this to the present time, we have an outbreak of another disease that we had supposedly put to rest with the coming of a vaccine.

Measles is another horrid disease, and we had put that one out to pasture with a vaccine, but for some reason, some people do not want to use it for a variety of reasons, some of them religiously based.

Look, these horrid diseases don't care about what religion you are, what race you are, what your family background is; once you get it, you got it, and it can be very debilitating, and can lead to death.

Some people say it is a personal rights issue; you take it if you want to, and the government can't force you to take it.

But when you inflict someone unwittingly with the disease, it skirts that point entirely.

As I spoke about yesterday, we have an outbreak of measles in many Orthodox Jewish communities, where some people in these communities are refusing to take the vaccine on religious grounds. New York City, in particular, is fighting this, vowing to close down yeshivas until every child in those schools is vaccinated.

Now, the lawyers are coming around sniffing, and there are legal challenges to this vow.

How stupid, how really stupid.

Those refusing to take the vaccine are not only putting themselves and their children at risk, they are putting others they don't even know at risk.

Although the outbreaks in New York are centered around the city and Rockland County, other municipalities are becoming vigilant in striving to prevent this disease from coming to their areas, including Nassau County on Long Island.

Take it from me, measles is a horrible disease. I had it as a very young child, when there was no vaccine available (my mother claims I did not have it, I had a variant of it, but for years she said I had it, so I will go with what she previously said).

I don't remember much, except for being quarantined for a while.

And yes, back then, I could have died from it.

Now, and for decades, we have had a simple vaccine. One pinch, and you are done.

Those shunning the vaccine are not doing their civic duty. They must get this vaccine so we as a society can once again wipe out this dreaded disease, as we did with polio.

I am hoping that clearer minds come to this realization, and if people are forced to take the vaccine, so be it.

It is for everyone's betterment.

Have a good weekend. I will speak to you again on Monday.