The Answer, My Friend...

Following on from yesterday's post about the curious idea of individual autonomy, one obvious concomitant of the concept is particularly apposite during this plague year. Some feel that vaccination against pandemic disease to be an infringement of their personal human right to that autonomy; and whilst I might just [just] entertain the idea of objection to it on religious,  and certainly on particular medical grounds; the notion of objecting to it because of some notion of individual freedom of expression is just plain barmy, given the pickle the world is in at the moment.

People of my age have grown up in an era when the myriad of childhood diseases that cut short the lives of many, many of our forebears prior to mass vaccination programs no longer hold sway, at least in the developed world. But the success of these programs relies on the participation of as many, if not all, of the current cohort to work. If you were born in the mid-fifties as I was, you were literally on the cusp of that inoculation revolution: certain diseases still killed and scarred for life, many children and adults.

One such illness that was still having a major impact during the years of my early childhood was polio. We were born at the time when the first effective vaccine was being rolled out. Not all of our generation were lucky and caught the disease before the vaccination programme was completed - at least two friends of mine were affected by it; but subsequent generations of kids have been spared from this horrible disease by standard inoculation at a young age, effectively eliminating polio from the cohort.

But it, and many other like diseases could simply return if people start refusing to get their children vaccinated. We've already seen the effects of the scepticism regarding MMR: Measles, Mumps and Rubella - they might sound comical, even benign, but these were not fun to get: I had them all as a child as the vaccines for them hadn't yet been developed. I was lucky and got fairly mild cases of all of them - but my sister could so easily have died from measles, as she wasn't so lucky and developed a full-blown case which was truly awful.

My point is, that we aren't individuals living in some glorious [no, horrendous] autonomous isolation. We can't exist outside [some form of] society, it simply isn't possible. We depend on others as they, in turn, depend on us and I really don't know at what point in our recent history we lost sight of that simple human fact; but if you are tending towards the notion that you are an island entire of itself, then it would be instructive to take time out and watch this guy talk about his life. Just don't ask for whom the bell tolls: you already know the answer, my friend.