Jon Stewart looked at the recent outbreak of diseases that we once thought had been eliminated in the US and some of the reasons given by people behind the trend to not vaccinate children. Potential presidential candidate Rand Paul said the same kinds of things that Michele Bachmann said about vaccination back in 2012, and passed along stories that he had heard about children getting neurological problems from getting the vaccine. She was mercilessly ridiculed for it back then and it will be interesting to see if it will similarly come back to haunt Paul.
(This clip aired on February 3, 2015. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
I wrote this on Butterflies and Wheels:
How times have changed. I was born not too many years after the polio vaccine. Most of my vaccinations were given in school by the school nurse (yes, in a town of 4000 population, we had a full-time school nurse, albeit she covered the elementary, middle, and high schools). The teacher would simply announce that tomorrow we would get a shot, so everybody be sure to wear a shirt with short or loose sleeves. AFAIK, nobody was exempted. We kids didn’t like the shots, of course, but everybody accepted that it was good for you and if you had tried to ask your parents to get you off the hook you would have been labeled a crybaby by the kids, and your parents would probably have told you the government set up this program and they had your best interests at heart. And this was in Arizona.
As a military brat who grew up mostly overseas, I got to see (and experience!) many illnesses first-hand. Chicken pox, measles, mumps…I had them all before I was 3 years old. I missed polio, because the polio vaccine kept me safe. But I knew children who had had polio, and their lives were immeasurably worse for having it. My kids (born in the USA) got their vaccinations. My son asked for Gardasil when his sister got it--he’s now a physics & math double-major in college, so obviously the shot didn’t make him retarded as Michelle Bachmann claimed.