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My Covid-19 Vaccination, Part I

My Covid-19 Vaccination, Part I

There were many times, I'm sure, when my mother was disappointed in me, but one memory is seared into my brain like rice scorched into the bottom of a forgotten pot on the stove. Imagine it's your mom's favorite pot. The one she inherited from the good grandmother.

I was 16, and for reasons I can't remember, I had to get a blood test at the hospital where Mom worked as a nurse's aide. This was the age when I was diagnosed with severe asthma, so maybe this was a test to see if I was going to die. I may be exaggerating.

Anyway, this blood test was a very big deal to both of us for different reasons.

For Mom, this was a chance to introduce her oldest daughter to dozens of co-workers before I left for college and immediately forgot the names of the parents who raised me (Mom's fear).

For teenage me, it was the daylight version of a slasher film, in which someone you trust coaxes you down the hallway and into the arms of the guy wielding a pickax. You might call it a needle.

Seventeen years earlier, my mother had to give up her dream of becoming a nurse because she became pregnant with me. She never put it like that. I was a gift from God, she always said, who helped her see that she was destined to be a mother.

Still, wouldn't it be nice, she often added, if her oldest daughter decided it would be her dream come true to become a nurse? Purely coincidentally, of course.

I was all in, until the day we went for that blood test. Again, I don't remember the details, but that never mattered as long as Mom was alive, because she remembered it with the accuracy of that witness to multiple crimes who nails the police lineup every time.

Apparently, it took a lot of negotiating to get me into the one-armed chair. After the needle pierced my skin, I started to hyperventilate. "What a performance," Mom said every single time we talked about this, which was often. For decades.

After the blood test was over, I reportedly stood up and said, ever so softly, "Uh-oh." Down I went, taking Mom with me.

Here comes the part I do remember: We're in the car in our driveway, after a silent trip home. Mom cuts the engine, looks at my bandaged forehead and says, "Maybe Leslie will be the nurse."

And God said, "It is done."

My sister Les became the nurse Mom had always wanted to be.

I still hate needles. Two years ago, a friend started describing over dinner how she loves to watch her blood shoot up the line when she donates it. I ended up with my head between my knees to keep from fainting right there in the restaurant. "Just looking for an earring," I said.

"Where is this going?" you may wonder.

Come with me. I'll drive.

We're sitting in my Jeep, made by union workers in Ohio, as we turn into the county fairgrounds. We are joining dozens of other cars slowly streaming in front of us and behind us. Remember that last scene in "Field of Dreams," when that long line of cars is winding its way to the magical baseball field in the cornfield? It's like that.

Friendly people wearing masks and smiling eyes are welcoming us, nodding hello to you, my passenger, as they check my license. One nice woman directs me to veer right because, being my mother's daughter, I have already printed my medical form and filled it out before leaving the house.

The sun is shining (it really was), and something is happening inside me as I slowly pull into what looks like a 4-H barn at the county fair. It's a feeling I've never had before.

I can't wait to get that shot.

I lower my car window, shove up my sleeve and offer it to the masked man with the needle. "Thank you," I tell him as he injects my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. "Thank you, thank you."

A week from today, I will be 28 hours out from my second dose of this vaccine for COVID-19. I may experience some side effects, but I can't wait to get that next shot. I'll let you know how it goes.

If Mom were here, she'd tell you that if her oldest daughter can get this shot, so can you.

Then she'd tell you a story. You know the one.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University's school of journalism. She is the author of two non-fiction books, including "...and His Lovely Wife," which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. She is also the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Daughters of Erietown. To find out more about Connie Schultz (schultz.connie@gmail.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com

California Governor Signs Tough New Vaccination Law

California Governor Signs Tough New Vaccination Law

By Phil Willon and Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation Tuesday, California barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization.

California’s weakened public health defenses against measles and other preventable diseases led to the adoption of the measure, signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown, intended to stem the rising number of parents opting not to inoculate their children.

Public health officials said a proliferation of waivers, many sought because of unfounded health concerns, helped fuel a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in December and quickly spread across the West, infecting 150 people.

“I think it’s a great day for California’s children. You’re living in a state that just got a little safer,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an advocate of immunization.

California joins Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states to ban vaccination waivers based on religion. All 50 states require immunization of children starting school, although about 20 allow exemptions based on personal beliefs.

Beginning with the 2016 school year, the new law could affect more than 80,000 California students.

Only medical exceptions will be allowed for those entering day care and kindergarten. Children with physician-certified allergies and immune-system deficiencies, for example, will be exempted.

Parents can still decline to vaccinate children who attend private home-based schools or public independent studies off campus.
“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”

Brown had supported a religious exemption as recently as 2012, and faced criticism because of it.

This year, hundreds of people opposed to vaccination descended on the Capitol to protest the new legislation. They argued that it would violate parents’ right to make decisions about their children’s health and interfere with their children’s right to a public education.

“I’m heartbroken,” said Rebecca Estepp of Poway, who belongs to the advocacy group California Coalition for Health Choice, which opposed the legislation. “It’s so coercive. It’s so punitive.”

Estepp, who said her 17-year-old son was injured by a vaccine, said opponents would be likely to challenge the law in court.
Dotty Hagmier, a mother of three from Orange County who also criticized the measure, said many families may choose home schools or move out of the state.

“These moms are strong,” she said. “And they’re not going to just give up. They’re not going to give up their rights.”

Health officials say declining immunization rates have led to a loss of “herd immunity” in some schools and communities, a situation in which high local vaccination rates against a contagious disease suppress it from spreading.

“When you get really close to immunizing everybody … the less you’ll see of those diseases,” said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, interim health officer for Los Angeles County.

Gunzenhauser said the Los Angeles public health department would work with schools to make sure children who register without being up to date on vaccinations become caught up as soon as possible.

Until recently, many preventable diseases, including whooping cough and mumps, were thought to be largely eradicated due to widespread inoculation. The United States declared measles to be eliminated from the country in 2000.

Fueled by persistent assertions that vaccines were linked to autism, a growing number of parents began declining immunizations for their children. Vaccination rates in California’s kindergarten classes steadily declined between 2001 and 2013, particularly in affluent and coastal areas of the state.

As immunization rates dipped, there were flare-ups of measles. A 2012 bill required parents who sought personal-belief exemptions to first be informed by a health care professional about the benefits and risks of vaccines. Brown signed that bill but carved out an exception for those who declined vaccines for religious reasons.

The Disneyland outbreak — the worst in California in 15 years — was a catalyst for further legislative action.

Public health officials warn that California remains at high risk of another outbreak because immunization levels in some communities remain so low. Dr. Gil Chavez, the state epidemiologist, said in April that immunization rates in some schools are at 50 percent or lower, creating an ideal environment for the virus to spread.

Last fall, 13,592 kindergarten students — 2.54 percent of California’s kindergarteners — had personal-belief exemptions on file. That is a sharp increase from 1998, when 4,032 kindergarteners, or 0.77 percent, had them.

The new vaccination law goes into effect a year from now. On July 1, 2016, newly enrolled children in day care and school will need to be immunized absent medical waivers.

Children who have a personal-belief exemption on file before Jan. 1, 2016 will have more time to comply with the law.

Such children who are in nursery school or preschool must comply to enroll in kindergarten; those in elementary school must do so by 7th grade. Those already in junior high and high school will remain exempt.

Leah Russin, a Palo Alto mother who worked with Vaccinate California, an advocacy group in favor of the legislation, said the new law helps assuage fears that many communicable diseases could afflict her 22-month-old son, Leo.

“There are a lot of things to worry about when you have a little kid,” Russin said, “but I no longer have to worry that he’s going to get measles at school.”
___
(Times staff writers Rong-Gong Lin, Eryn Brown and Emily Foxhall contributed to this report.)

Photo: Not the most magical place on earth when children are sick. The measles outbreak at Disneyland earlier this year triggered California to enact one of the strictest laws for vaccination in the country. This is Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland. Tom Bricker via Flickr

Rise Of The Know-Betters: Just The Facts About Anti-Vaxx

Rise Of The Know-Betters: Just The Facts About Anti-Vaxx

The anti-vaccination movement, a species of stupidity that crosses party lines and is immune to evidence (if little else), has emerged from the curio cabinet of fringe lunacies and ambled into the spotlight on the heels of a public health crisis — and is now becoming an unfortunate flashpoint in the opening salvos of the 2016 primaries. Why, after all, are we even talking about this?

The Republican Party, so unmoved by science on climate change and evolution, for the most part has refreshingly come out in rousing support of vaccines. Even Ben Carson says there should be no exemptions from vaccination. So who exactly are editorials like this aimed at? Why are too many children under-vaccinated? Why are pundits and pols waffling on the merits of discredited studies and paranoid theories? In the Year of our Lord Two-Thousand-Fifteen, how has the efficacy of vaccines entered the political discussion? Into what fresh hell have we blundered?

The current measles outbreak has thrust a conversation about the supposed dangers of vaccines — as useless and noxious as a pertussal wheeze — into the mainstream. Chris Christie and Rand Paul, perhaps sensing a nucleus of vaccine skeptics in Florida or Ohio, contributed their thoughts, suggesting that vaccinations might actually become a touchstone issue for the 2016 elections (as we dread they might). And in the scrimmage of wacky one-upmanship that is a hallmark of primaries, you may reasonably expect to see a spectrum of weaselly, “teach the controversy” positions, all in a cynical bid to poach votes from anti-vaxxers of both parties.

The to-vaxx-or-not-to-vaxx issue has forged a strange fellowship between black helicopter right wingers, who believe vaccination is just a step away from martial law, and crunchy granola left wingers who buy into the fallacy of an “all-natural” lifestyle. A poll on the main page of Life Health Choices (a resource for anti-vaxxers) asks: “Is vaccination choice a fundamental human right?” — erroneously positioning the issue as one of individual liberty and a parent’s right to raise his or her child without government intervention. Such attitudes mesh with the folly of well-educated, liberal parents who want to raise their children completely free of all “chemicals.” In both cases, the cri de coeur is “I know better!”

Together they form an unholy union born of shared unreason, which an acquaintance of mine calls the “Know-Better Party.” All the studies and medical testimony in the world doesn’t nudge the Know-Betters. Their self-perception as responsible parents and free thinkers depends on their rejection of whatever wisdom they hold to be conventional: It doesn’t matter exactly where they fall along party lines; all that matters is they know better than you.

If you’re a Know-Better, then what are you doing here? Whether or not facts have any currency with you, whether or not you agree with the overwhelming majority of doctors, you’ve already made up your mind. So thanks for reading this far. Did you come here to be outraged; to shake your head in disapproval; to decry us as child murderers, cynical clickbaiters, choir preachers; to urge new research into the safety and efficacy of vaccines; to tell us that none of this is news?

In that, if nothing else, we may agree. There is no news here. There is no ethical dilemma. There is no startling research waiting in the wings. There is in fact no controversy. This article is an ouroboros decrying its own existence. The Know-Betters have taken enough of our time. All that’s left are the same old facts, to which we dutifully direct you:

But perhaps most sobering of all is a recent study in Pediatrics suggesting that whatever you believe, your mind cannot be changed:

Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive.

If that is true — and it seems in poor taste for us to discount a study when it suits us — then, well, our bad.

Photo: v1ctor Casale via Flickr

WATCH: No, Vaccinations Do Not Cause Autism

In 1998 a paper published in the journal The Lancet connected measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations with the development of autism. Though the paper was later retracted, the myth persists and has led to a movement encouraging parents to reject MMR vaccinations for their children (while also encouraging lawsuits against the vaccine makers).

And that movement has led to both a waste of funds that could be used to research the disorder and likely even the loss of real human lives.

“I do not deny that we need to do more about autism,” pediatrician and health researcher Aaron Carroll said in the latest episode of his Healthcare Triage web series, where he reviews the history of the controversy, “but it has nothing to do with vaccines.”

Aaron Carroll

 

Screenshot via Healthcare Triage YouTube channel