Are anti-vaxxers the ultimate proof humanity is too stupid to live? [View all]

[Kurska]

We currently live in an age where a child can expect to live a long and healthy life. It wasn't always this way. What are now considered preventable diseases (through vaccination) used to claim a yearly grim harvest of lives both young and old. Contrasted with today, in the past you could expect a number of any children you had to be killed or crippled by diseases like smallpox and polio. Through modern medicine, especially vaccinations, we've wiped out diseases that used to be considered just another dark inevitability of life.

Today an ever growing number of parents are looking at the greatest accomplishment of evidence based medicine and are declaring "Screw that, I know better.".

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/

Some areas of country currently have vaccination rates as low as third world countries torn apart by civil war. Not only is this causing a resurgence of diseases that had been previously declare dead in America, it is portending the possibility of something much darker. Just as we fret over the possibility of ebola going airborne, we also need to realize that every single new infection in our communities gives these viruses a chance to mutate. It opens up the possibility that these viruses could adapt, becoming more deadly, more transmissible or god forbid all these things while at the same time gaining new means to attack the already vaccinated. A new scourge that in our interconnected and independent society could kill thousands if not millions, before modern medicine could muzzle it. Laugh off this possibility all you want, by giving these deadly diseases a new foothold in our society we are risking the rise of something much darker.

Are we really so idiotic as to snatch death and pestilence from the jaws of health and advancement? Vaccination rates in our country are increasingly attesting to the possibility that we might be.