Where have all the anti-vaxxers gone?

Suddenly they have gone quiet or perhaps the media have decided that they don’t deserve a voice right now when everyone is pleading for a Covid-19 vaccine. 

I’m so old that I remember life before vaccinations – they don’t. Here are three pre-vaccination personal stories – two with a happy ending and one without.

I remember having Measles when I was about 14 and lying, delirious with a high temperature quite a lot of the time, in a darkened room for about a week.  My parents were worried that I would go blind.

My sister contracted mumps and I followed soon afterwards. It wasn’t pleasant.  I remember the pain when swallowing more than anything else.  So far so good: except our mother and father also caught it and were very ill. Mother developed encephalitis and father an orchitis (you don’t want to know) and then pneumonia.  That was scarier to us than our own illness. 

The third was when I was in high school.  Coralie was an outstanding athlete – first team for all sports and, if I remember correctly, in the open team, not the under fifteen.  One term we came back to school to find that Coralie was in hospital in an iron lung (pre-ventilator and intubation days). She did return to school with both legs in metal braces with crutches. We tried to help but there were too many stairs and she had to leave.  

The catastrophe of Covid-19 reflects a world without vaccines!

The anti-vax brigade also castigates “big pharma” – who needs them?

Number One Husband remembers contracting Scarlet Fever when he was about eight or nine and also being a darkened room.  His mother stayed with him and his father and brother moved out of the house to stay with relatives. He remembers waving to his father through the window. I don’t know if it was a consequence of the temperature His skin also peeled afterwards.  There is no vaccine for scarlet fever – a course of antibiotics sorts that out these days. 

Back to blogging about food tomorrow….