As of a few days ago, the number of measles cases in the United States since the beginning of the year reached 1,088. This is quite a lot compared to the 285 cases in all of last year. Both Iowa and Nebraska have reported their first cases this year, and because so many people across the country are unvaccinated and not naturally immune because the virus has not been circulating, the virus keeps getting carried around. Read the report from the University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy): https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/measles/us-measles-total-nears-1100-cases-colorado-reports-airline-cluster.
The Texas/New Mexico outbreak has reached 738 cases, 79 of them in New Mexico. Most of the New Mexico cases have been in Lea County, next to Texas, but there have been 2 in Doña Ana County. While most the West Texas cases are children, in New Mexico, almost half are over 18. See the NM Department of Health statistics at https://www.nmhealth.org/about/erd/ideb/mog/.
For those people born after 1957, getting a Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccination will help stop the spread of the disease. One shot will be around 93% effective at stopping transmission, and two shots will raise that immunity to almost 97%. If you were born before 1957, your childhood predated the invention of the vaccine. Since in those good old days everyone got measles (about 95%), your being alive means that you survived an infection and are naturally immune. In the 50s, before the vaccine, there were 400 to 500 deaths from measles every year, 1,000 cases of brain swelling, and about 48,000 hospitalizations. So far this year, only 3 people have died. Though the population is about double what it was then, medical intervention is more successful.
I worked for a world renowned virologist as an Undergrad assistant back in the very early ’70s. I never thought much of him, or the thin science behind virology– front loaded with just theory, and a total lack of observations—which is where science starts Max.
I have three search words for you “American Eugenics Society”. Look for the NIH (National Institute of Health is pretty reliable science) link. Ignorance. today is no excuse. This rabbit hole is a deep one with lots of history. I look forward to running in to you and discussing this further. Yuval Harari of the WEF has boiled us down to programable animals. You??
Eugenics, Lee, was based on the idea of inheritance of traits. No one, as far as I know, has claimed that measles vaccinations are inheritable. Therefore, I don’t see how measles vaccinations tie in with eugenics.
If you mean virology and eugenics are both pseudo-sciences, then you have a rather complicated argument which you have not made, only asserted a conclusion drawn totally unscientifically.
You begin your argument rather badly with a mistaken statement about what science is and does. You say that science “starts” with observations. This is not true because the world is full of things to observe, and the only way to direct one’s scientific gaze at a limited parcel of those observable things is to start with an idea, a theory, of how things work. Then the scientist can observe the things the idea circumscribes. Otherwise, nothing happens but a bunch of disconnected and useless observations. The history of science is all about how some people have a theory and then they create observable situations (experiments) to verify the theory. That sequence for drug and procedure testing, for example, is what is required by the NIH in its various trials: a theory (producing a procedure or a drug) to start, and then the trial (observation) to prove.
Your experience in a virology lab as a student reminds me of a joke physicists in the 50s use to tell, that biology was just cream and sugar. That is, instead of testing a theory, biologists just added a bit of sugar and a little cream until they got the taste of their morning coffee right. It seems as an undergraduate, you were still in the sugar and cream mode while the virologist you complain about had advanced to a scientific procedure. It was, after all, just a few years before that time that virologists invented the MMR vaccine. I say “invented” because it was not discovered accidentally by observation as smallpox vaccines were but invented by attenuating the measles virus to create a virus that activated the immune system but did not cause the complex symptoms (all theoretically possible) and then tested through observation.