The Timid Activist

An article ran this week on the front page of the Cheyenne paper entitled “Are vaccines safe for kids?” It was a bad article as it pitted the local experts (a pediatrician and a state epidemiologist) against some activists from Wyoming with no credentials who are against vaccines blah blah blah. It gave five websites for people to check out the supposed pros and cons, two were good, WebMD and the CDC but three were awful, conspiracy theory sites, vaccines cause autism and brain damage etc. stuff. There was no mention of the importance of herd immunity nor the very recent outbreaks in our country of whooping cough and other preventable diseases due to the lowered herd immunity from larger numbers of people choosing not to vaccinate their children.

Anyway, I made a comment in the comments section for the article online (along with many anti-vaccination activists who thought the article was” balanced” and “fair”) about what was missing in the article and that children’s lives were at stake. In a second comment I gave a link for an OP-ED piece that I had just seen in the LA Times that was excellent and I said this is what the journalist could have written and did the paper need to find a good science adviser? If you want to read the original article here is a link and you can read through the comments if you want to. http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2011/07/17/news/01top_07-17-11.txt

 

But, the kind of interesting thing is that the Cheyenne paper ran than same OP-ED piece that I had mentioned in my comment today on the opinion page. Here is the link to the original piece. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ropeik-vaccines-20110718,0,4240440.story

 

Maybe someone listened, or they were going to run it anyway and I am just imagining that I had anything to do with it. It won’t change the minds of the committed anti-vaccination activists but maybe a local person swayed away from vaccinations by the original article will think twice about that after reading the OP-ED piece. I hope so.

Lou

Here Today Gone Today

The delphinium were starting to bloom, the columbine were still going strong, the tomato was getting taller by the day and was starting to produce some green tomatoes, now all are gone or in shreds. We had a powerful thunderstorm just now that produced pea to quarter size hail over the top of us for twenty minutes. The street and yard were covered in white. It is sad because everything was getting so pretty, Oh well that is nature for you. We’ve got nothing to complain about though compared to the people in Joplin, Missouri and in the flooded areas of the Midwest.

The funny thing is that for every other storm recently, I’ve gone out and moved the tomato in its pot under the shelter of the pergola and pulled the planters in front of the garage into the garage, but this time I didn’t as I expected only rain. I could have saved them but I didn’t!

At least both cars were in the garage. We have a fairly new roof so hopefully it wasn’t damaged. We were also just about to walk down the street to the annual “Neighborhood Night Out” with the cake I baked to meet the neighbors from the surrounding area. I’m glad we were not down there when it started, there would have been no shelter at all when the ceiling fell out of the sky.

They are still going to try to grill some burgers once the rain stops. Maybe we should wear our snow boots for better traction. Ha.

Lou