In the 1960s, when I served as a young army captain in Vietnam, I had a friend in my unit whose favorite phrase when encountering bureaucratic intransigence would remark, ‘they’re too stupid to know they’re stupid,’ to describe people who ‘followed the regulations’ even when the regulations clearly didn’t work. He would throw up his hands when faced with an obstreperous clerk or sergeant and finally throw in the towel and say, “You can’t cure stupid.”
It’s taken me over fifty years, but I have finally realized that my friend was absolutely right. Stupidity, it seems, is an incurable disease. I want to make clear here that I’m not talking about ignorance, which is a lack of knowledge or education, a condition that can be corrected with a modicum of instruction. Stupidity is not just the lack of knowledge, it’s the refusal to obtain knowledge or the ignoring of facts that contradict preconceived beliefs.
Take the people who still object to vaccines despite over a hundred years of experience that demonstrates their effectiveness. Sure, they’re not one hundred percent effective; nothing is; but they provide a greater degree of protection from some dangerous diseases than refusing to take them does. The Salk vaccine vanquished polio, a disease that crippled hundreds of thousands of children even in my lifetime, including one who became the most powerful man in America, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of us aren’t good at looking back in history beyond a few years, but I remember when the polio vaccine came out and kids were required to line up and take it. There were fools even then who resisted. Thank goodness, the government prevailed, and no longer do we need iron lungs in emergency wards to help severely infected youngsters breathe.
Public schools in most of America require children to have certain vaccinations before they can enroll. One of the diseases that vaccines are required for is measles. A highly contagious disease, it is found around the globe and kills more than 2.6 million people annually. It can have severe side effects including pneumonia, encephalitis, and even immune system problems years after an infection. With all this baggage there are still people who object to their children getting measle shots.
In 2018, people coming back to the US from other countries brought back the measle virus which was fueled by pockets of unvaccinated people according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This resulted in 349 cases in 26 states and the District of Columbia, the second highest number since the disease was reportedly eliminated in the US in 2000. The highest number was 667 cases in 2014, also fueled by pockets of the unvaccinated. Still, there are those who refuse to get the vaccine or allow their children to get it.
Anti-vax movements which have gotten a lot of media coverage since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic are not new to the US or the world. Before Dr. Edward Jenner developed the vaccine for smallpox in England in 1796, there have been those who oppose vaccination for a whole host of reasons. Even though Jenner proved that his cowpox vaccine could protect against the deadlier smallpox there was immediate public criticism on the basis of sanitation, religion, among others.
While I understand many of the reasons that people object, I have to wonder if the objectors are considering anyone but themselves when they take such stands. If you leave on an isolated farm and have no contact with your fellow citizens I’m all for you deciding for yourself whether or not to take necessary health precautions. But when you step outside your house and insist on having the right to mingle and interact with those citizens, including me, then I object to your objections. Your rights end at the point where they touch my body and impact my health and wellbeing or that of my family. You do not have a right to send your unvaccinated child to a public school where he or she might pass some infection to others. Nor do you have a right to refuse to protect yourself from a deadly viral disease and still mingle with me and others in the public space.
And, do you want to know something? Many of those who object realize this. This is why so many of them get counterfeit vaccination cards. They know they are wrong, but they just do not care.
Try as we might, science has yet to come up with a cure for stupid. | NWI
