Ignoring the Cost of Anti-Intellectualism
The unbearably high price of right-wing ideology
Last week, an infant in Kentucky died of Pertussis, a condition commonly known as whooping cough. If the common term sounds a bit old-timey, that’s because it is. The first recorded cases date back all the way to the 16th century. But when a vaccine became available in the 1940s, deaths from pertussis became rare soon after. Once again, our ability to apply science and intellect to a problem resulted in a breakthrough that saved countless lives.
But today we live in an age of anti-science and anti-intellectualism, and children who have never heard either of those big, hyphenated words are the ones dying so the conspiracy theories can live on.
It makes me think of my own children, especially my oldest, who we vaccinated against Pertussis when she was an infant. At that time, anti-vax insanity was all the rage. It even had celebrity faces all over the TV telling us that vaccines cause everything from autism to impotence. I saw so much of it that I, someone who has always been both pro-science and pro-vaccines, asked my doctor about the risks of vaccinating my infant daughter. And when I asked my doctor the question “Should I vaccinate my child?” his answer was as cold and fed up as it could be. He simply looked down his nose at me and said, “Only if you want her to live.”
I’ll admit, it pissed me off. I didn’t like being talked to that way. The doctor was rude, or so I thought. But the difference between the me of that time and the anti-vaxxers of today is that my emotions had nothing to do with my decision to vaccinate my child. My doc may be an asshole, but he’s also the guy who knows, and I wasn’t about to risk my kid’s life just to spite him.
The infant who died of whooping cough last week was Kentucky’s third this year. Previous to this year, the last infant death from whooping cough there was in 2018. Kentucky is experiencing the largest number of cases since 2012, with most attributing the increase to anti-vax ideology. And yes, the infant who died last week was unvaccinated.
I do not know why the child was unvaccinated, and I do not know if it had anything to do with political ideology or the onslaught of anti-intellectual propaganda that is now the base message on just about every right-wing media outlet. I only know that a human life ended and that the end was preventable. I mourn the death of that child just as I do all the preventable deaths that seem to be growing in number just about everywhere in the United States. I mourn the Texas children who died of Measles, a disease we all but eliminated from the face of the Earth, only to revive it in the name of political advantage. And I certainly mourn the estimated 232,000 Americans who died of vaccine hesitancy during the Covid pandemic. And while there is an urge in me to point out the simple fact that some of these victims were adults who got exactly what they asked for by refusing the vaccines, infant deaths cannot be tolerated, nor can they be argued away with appeals to freedom, a word most anti-vaxxers simply do not understand.
Most of the opinion pieces that reference this most recent tragedy in Kentucky do so to forward the idea that Trump and his ilk are responsible for these deaths. I don’t disagree with this exactly; I just think doing so lets too many people off the hook. Trump didn’t invent anti-intellectualism; he just used it to gain the votes of underachievers everywhere by giving them someone to blame. It’s the right-wing playbook, and it’s much older than the decaying ghoul in the White House.
Go ahead. Blame Trump. Just don’t blame him alone. He had a lot of help killing those kids.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Unfortunately we're going to see a whole lot more people - predominantly children, pregnant women and vulnerable seniors...appreciate you reporting this
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