Being that, these days, I probably have more unclaimed time on my hands then since when I left the oral stage, I've become more intimate with the various blind alleys of the Internet in ways that I hadn't before. Laughing at misspelled birthday cakes, for instance. In days gone by I rarely, if ever, read the health columns of the New York Times, though maybe because I feared it would only increase my guilt for enjoying one drunken Kum-and-Go charbroil too many. But now endowed with greater liberty to follow idly whithersoever the little blue swatches of underlined text on the NYT may lead, whole new horizons of marginal knowledge have spread themselves wantonly before me.
Like today. After having wondered more than once to myself in the fall whether I should seek any additional vaccinations before setting up camp in Romania -- a needless, Othering concern, as it turns out -- I've learned now that more than a few Americans have decided that vaccines are to blame for their children's autism. Maybe it's the Black Ops neurotoxins in my MMR talking, but this whole time I had labored under the belief that maintaining the extinction of smallpox had some things going for it. After pressing the down-key a bunch of times while staring glazedly at this non-article from the august journal of medicine About.com, I remain unconvinced that my issue should not have to feel the kiss of the syringe, delivered by a lying son-of-a-bitch doctor ("This four-pronged bastard won't hurt!"), just like I did.
Mostly, though, it strikes me that only in a dumbingly wealthy country like the United States could people take their immunity from epidemics for granted and demonize the very fucking thing that keeps their kids from going off to TB summer camp or living inside a goddamn space capsule. I have reason to suspect there is somewhat less hand-wringing of this kind in the good old "Global South."
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