Little Miss Mandates

A couple of days ago, courtesy of some friends over at Facebook, I discovered a pro-vaccine rant posted at Salon.com written by a one Amanda Marcotte entitled The Superiority Complex of Vaccination Foes. Marcotte, a self-avowed, progressive (a collectivist ideology advancing the notion of an all-powerful state) attacks anyone having the temerity to challenge the wisdom of America’s absurd vaccination policy while at the same disparaging those believing in God. She begins:

 

Unlike with most anti-vaccination situations, the objections aren't coming from people whose faith in organic foods purchased at yuppie-tested enviroments are better disease prevention than vaccines, but from people returning to Old Faithful, the God card.

Oh those vaccine zealots. They imagine their precious little miracles to be threatened at every turn. Anyone who even desires a choice as to what medical treatments are administered to their healthy children is labeled anti-vaccine. As if vaccines were such a marvel, no rational person could ever oppose them. Sadly, for the public health communities and their statist supporters, vaccines are hardly miracles. They protect against largely mild illnesses* whose ability to cause death or serious injury was falling precipitously before the practice became widespread – this because contributory lifestyle factors almost always determine the progression of an illness.

As to her attacks on those worshiping God, perhaps it is because she thinks we should all really be worshiping the government and its minions in public health.

And finally notice how she employs the shopworn talking point about vaccine disinterest among yuppies (young urban professionals who ostensibly are well-educated) . She apparently favors a world like the one described by Orwell in the book 1984, in which obedience is the norm and “ignorance is strength.”

Continuing Marcotte states:

Obviously, this is not about children's rights. The children's rights are being violated by their parents, who believe their right to use their children as symbols to prove their piety trumps their children's right to health.

She seems painfully unaware that in free countries parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit - unless an action or non-action places those children at risk of serious harm. Not getting vaccinated in no way reaches that threshold. In fact, based on all the mistakes of the past involving vaccination, the procedure’s unknown effects on a child’s developing immune system and the acknowledged side effects many children must endure, one could successfully argue that it is the lifetime of vaccination from which the child needs to be protected.

Then pretending to possess an understanding of “rights,” she declares:

Of course, we live in an environment where conservatives are claiming that it's a violation of "religious liberty" if you can't force your beliefs on others. The degradation of understanding of what a right is and who has it is one that historians of early 21st century America will find fascinating, I'm sure.

Apparently, the only rights she recognizes are those allowing the state to initiate threats and violence against innocent individuals in order to further her collectivist agenda.

Progressive nuts such as Marcotte want the state to be in charge of our health because they want the state to be in charge of us. As such, the decision to medicate us is theirs, not our own. In a world where the government exists to care for us, there is nothing the mommy state cannot do. Sadly supporters of the failed collectivists and progressives ideologies such as Marcotte have little respect for real rights, especially the foundational one: the right to liberty. For them true rights are simply obstacles to the deluded notion that they could ever realize their utopian fantasies.
 

Rambling on she arrives at the topic of anti-vaccine “fanatics”:

What's interesting here is how revealing this whole situation is of the psychological baggage that leads a person to become an anti-vaccination fanatic.

Marcotte fails to comprehend the real fanatics are the public health do-gooders running around chasing a few cases of mild illnesses such as the measles in order to justify their feeding off the productive, taxpaying members of society. Their baggage requires them to deceive themselves with the delusionary notion that they, by preventing a few cases of the mumps or chickenpox are somehow heroic lifesavers and guardians of America’s children. Talk about psychological baggage.

She then appeals to egalitarianism (another far-left ideology in which the state has to force everyone to be equal and the identical by whatever means necessary) in her defense of America’s indefensible compulsory vaccination policy while using the childlike argument that if an injustice is already being perpetrated against another, it must be OK.

Whether it's because you think God loves you best or because you think your dedication to organic produce confers magical health benefits, the underlying sentiment of anti-vaccination believers is that they and theirs are special, and shouldn't be subject to the unclean health practices of the common folk. Vaccination is just too democratic a practice. Rich and poor, black and white, Christian or not: we all have to sit in the same chair while the same nurse pokes us with the same batch of drugs. They don't even have special needles for the better class of person getting a vaccination. Getting vaccinated is to health care like taking the bus is to transportation. The very act of it insinuates that your special snowflake of a child could become infected with germs that come from someone else's totally-not-special kid

It’s not surprising the author would deride those seeing themselves as individuals and not objects of state control.

The idea that each child is special (I don’t know where the snowflake part comes in but I’ve been seeing it used extensively in the “skeptical” community recently) is anathema to those who would have us live in a hive or in a herd. The dream of Marcotte and those like her has us living as a nation of medicated, homogenized, collectivized, indoctrinated, compliant sheep. To those of us who value freedom, Marcotte's dream is a nightmare and it's one that has been going on for far too long. Time to wake up, America.







*Or they protect against illnesses for which most of us are not at risk. For example hepatitis B.