By Ben R. Williams
Back when I was a full-time journalist, I asked my editor if I could do a story about the anti-vaccination movement.
Initially, my editor wasn’t interested. This was solely because they had never encountered an anti-vaxxer and they genuinely couldn’t believe anyone would be dumb enough turn down a vaccine and risk catching a deadly disease.
As you have no doubt already guessed, this was a few years before COVID.
I told my editor about the growing anti-vax movement and the people like Jenny McCarthy who were pushing debunked claims that vaccines cause autism. The editor agreed to let me do the story.
I contacted the head of the local health department and he was more than happy to do an interview. This cause was close to home for him; his father caught polio before the vaccine was available and had been disabled as a result.
During that interview, the health department head laid out an argument that has stuck with me ever since. A big part of the reason the anti-vax movement is thriving, he said, is because vaccines are incredibly effective.
It may seem counterintuitive, but unfortunately, it makes perfect sense.
At its height, measles infected hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. each year. After the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, the number began to plummet. For many years, there were fewer than 200 cases per year in the U.S., up until the mid to late 2000s when anti-vaxxers caused the number to rise back into the thousands.
Polio, meanwhile, used to paralyze, disable, and kill thousands of U.S. citizens each year. The polio vaccine essentially eradicated the virus from this country by 1980.
If you’re about 60 years old or younger, chances are good that you’ve never seen someone infected with the measles. You’ve never seen anyone die from polio. Outside of the guy from “The Big Lebowski,” you’ve probably never seen anyone in an iron lung. Vaccines wiped out these threats.
Because these vaccines were so effective, for some people, the threat of these diseases became distant and abstracted. It’s a lot harder to understand why you should vaccinate your child against polio when you’ve never seen someone trapped inside a giant stationary metal tube that forces them to breathe.
During the height of COVID, there were so many reports from nurses of anti-vax patients who began begging for the COVID vaccine only when they were deep in respiratory failure and it was too late for any kind of intervention. Some people can only grasp the true nature of a threat when they’re experiencing it firsthand.
But this problem isn’t unique to medicine. It’s political, too.
For most of my life, I’ve heard folks say that it truly doesn’t matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office. Sure, every President will introduce their own policies, but the big picture stuff will keep chugging along no matter who’s in charge. There has been a sense that there’s a unique quality to America, a kind of preordination; no matter what happens, America will remain an inspiring beacon to the world, Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
A big part of the reason for that, I think, is that our nation has seldom experienced a truly incompetent Presidential administration.
Sure, we’ve had some rough patches. Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan set the stage for the Civil War. Warren G. Harding was corrupt and incompetent. But those folks held office a long time ago, and they also held office during that magical time before humanity had invented weapons that could literally destroy all life on Earth, so the stakes were not quite as high.
In the modern era, we have never experienced a Presidential administration as incompetent as President Donald Trump’s. We have never known what it’s like to have a Presidency where all the adults have been forced from the room, leaving only warmongers and sycophants. We’ve had administrations that were ineffective, and we’ve had administrations that were cruel, but we’ve never before had an administration that had absolutely no idea what it was doing.
Now we’re seeing what that looks like. It looks like a war in Iran that was allegedly started to destroy a nuclear program that the President swore a few months earlier had already been totally destroyed. It looks like an administration that thought it could handily topple a regime that’s been preparing for this exact moment for three decades. It looks like a President claiming a war has already been won while simultaneously begging our allies for help, then being shocked when the allies that he’s spent a year denigrating and punishing with tariffs refuse to join a fight they didn’t start. It looks like a President who says that he’ll reduce the national debt and then causes it to surpass $39 trillion, resulting in the Treasury quietly declaring the U.S. insolvent.
Maybe, in the long run, shattering the illusion that America is invincible will be a good thing. It’s a whole lot easier to understand the threat of polio when you’ve seen the results, and the way things are going, we’re all about to crawl inside the iron lung for ourselves.
