A mother whose child died aged six from a brain inflammation caused by measles hopes sharing her story will encourage parents to “vaccinate more”.
It comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned of measles outbreaks in parts of London.
Gemma Larkman-Jones wants more parents to consider having their children vaccinated sooner.
…
Prof Dame Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, warned that measles is spreading among unvaccinated communities, and added that a “national call to action” is needed across the country.
Vaccination rates across the UK have been dropping, but there are particular concerns in parts of the capital as well as in some areas of the West Midlands.
Sometimes I think about how years ago parents would lie over their children’s beds crying. Praying for a miracle because that is all that can save their child now is the work of God. They have see this before, heard the stories. Seen the other children die just recently. They know the pain, they know what is coming. They have done all they can. They sent for the doctor who said he won’t be coming back as he has other patients to attend to, ones that might live. Yes they do what they can but it is all for nothing. They bury their child and go back home.
They sit there unable to cry anymore, the silence is broken from a cough in the younger child’s room. They then pray to God that this is just a cold. God doesn’t listen, God doesn’t bring miracles. But man does. One day the work of God comes in the hands of the many and changes the suffering forever.
Sometimes I wonder what those people would say to us. I bet they would hate us for not taking something they would give their lives for.
Some of us here are old enough to remember when everyone knew someone who had had polio, or had had it themselves. Our parents lined us up around the block for both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, even knowing that for some of these recipients, it would miss, or worse, cause harm. We all did it anyway. Because we all knew what the alternative was. When I was five, the smallpox vax almost took me out – but I never heard a word of regret, or uttered one myself, because the reality of a real smallpox infection is magnitudes worse.
For a few years, when Salk or Sabin were spotted in public, parents would literally hug their feet. This is not an exaggeration. They were literally considered human saints, and their vaccines literal miracles. Before the polio vaccine, anyone – especially the healthiest of the young, who should have been most immune to any illness – could feel sick in the morning and be paralyzed or dead by nightfall. If you lived, you often walked with a limp or a cane, and that doesn’t account for post-polio complications: you could “survive” polio and still have it kill you decades later. Older folks are STILL dying of post-polio complications today, in the same way that people who survived “the Spanish flu” in 1918-1921 succumbed to neurological illnesses decades later.
I don’t believe in the god part of it, but you can’t fault them for grasping for those straws. Because for all of human history until the last century or so, prayers were all you had left when the medicines ran out, and even getting anything effective to start with, including a diagnosis, was sketchy as hell. Everything from “bad air” (miasma) to “imbalanced humours” was considered valid disease theory.
We are SO much more privileged now than we realize. And the realities we don’t care to see are willingly hidden from us by the curators of the media we consume. Back then, news was deadly serious, almost sacred, and very highly valued. People didn’t fuck with it. Walter Cronkite was possibly the most trusted man in the United States, and everyone knew who Edward R. Murrow was long after he died in 1965. But today, it doesn’t even make a pretense at being news: it’s entertainment, even when it’s news. So who is going to show us the realities no one like to see and advertisers won’t pay to support?
So I already know what your fictional parents would say. I don’t have to guess, because polio survivors were all around me when I was a kid. And it wasn’t just vaccines; antibiotics did not really become widespread until after WWII in the US. Many, many people had living memories of the TB sanatoriums, and friends they’d had that died far too young, and how in many wars illness killed more soldiers on all sides than bullets ever did. Gene Tierney, a movie actress, was pregnant and got German measles from a fan on a USO tour; because of it her daughter was born profoundly disabled and lived most of her long life institutionalized. Scarlet fever, measles, all these diseases were still in living memory, along with their profound costs and legacies of pain.
So people did not dick around with illness, in the same way most of us don’t dick around with gravity tests off tall buildings, because it was far too often either outright deadly, or came with too many consequences to take chances with.
People did what they had to do to avoid getting sick, it was part of being a good citizen, and if you didn’t do it you were an embarrassment and a fool. It wasn’t just you doing it for yourself, it was literally what you owed to your community as a human being.
Had anyone said the anti-vax, anti-science shit some are saying today, they’d have become an instant pariah and outcast, and widely seen as the threat to the common good that they are.
You would be surprised to know that some people today unironically believe that the germ theory is a hoax, and yes it’s the demographic you are suspecting.
People back in the day were scared of inoculation/vaccination as well. See the following comic about a cow pox inoculation turning people into cows: https://www.themorgan.org/sites/default/files/images/blog/gillray_277009v_0001.jpg
It’s not just a modern phenomena.
Which god? There’s so many, how do you keep them all straight. Apollo? Zeus? It’s Ra, isn’t it? I bet you’re talking about Ra!
I’m sure people prayed to them all.
I’m sure none answered.
Man answered, just too late for millions.
You’re being downvoted but I agree. None of this has anything to do with religion. A weird fiction that invokes “[the Christian] God provided the vaccine” is irrelevant and disrespectful to the humans that worked hard to create a vaccine.
It’s a pretty bad idea in general to bring up a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent “God” in the context of children dying of diseases anyway. What kind of God would allow children to die of cancer? Or any number of other currently incurable diseases?
I think they’re saying they prayed to their “god” and from their perspective “their god” delivered through science.
Not that god actually did anything
I actually meant it more like humans hold the power of a God in their hands. Something that could only have been seen as magical, as fairytale, as something humans do not have at their disposal. It only exists out there to beings that are not our own. That’s who people pray to because it is beyond man’s powers, children were beyond saving.
I didn’t mean it as the work of God for I’m an atheist. I meant it like they prayed to a God and got ignored. But through science we created Godlike powers.
I would say antibiotics and vaccines are literal God powers. Not from God but if you went back 100 years with that power people would think you a God.
Anti vaccine rhetoric has an extremely high correlation to religious people. The commentor was speculating about how these people in the past would have felt about the anti vaccine people today. It’s a valid question. People back then didn’t have access to information or access to much real hope; it’s not surprising they were religious.