You want pure nature? OK, die young.

I spotted a nice little rant from Jeffrey Kluger on Time.com on anti-vaxxers.

I hope that writing it was some sort of cathartic experience for Jeffrey, as while it carefully explains all the reasons that anti-vaxxers are foolish, short-sighted and downright wrong, it will have about as much effect as bringing a banana to a gunfight. But I recognise that sometimes you just need to get these things out of your system before the frustration makes your brain go totes cray cray and you start using sloppy internet slang.

Parents who oppose vaccines are not only misinformed, they’re spoiled, having grown up in a world that stands behind the berms built by the scientists and vaccine developers who came before them. If you’ve never seen measles — or polio or whooping cough or mumps — you have the luxury of believing they don’t exist.

Forget the pretty flowers and the Instagrammable sunsets. There’s another side to Nature: viruses, evil bacteria, disease, sickness. Yep, sadly, it turns out that Nature is actually a bit of a bitch. As Jeffrey points out, science (or “messing with nature”) allows us to live longer, it means that we don’t die in childhood, it means that simple infections don’t kill us anymore (for the moment, anyway).
Because those were all things that happened a lot before science happened (see here).
Now, I think that those are good things. Positive things. Fine reasons to embrace and celebrate the progress we have made. Working in science, it’s disappointing when others don’t feel that way, but it’s tragic when their irresponsible decisions impact on the defenceless individuals in our society.

I’m not going to carry on. My rant would have about as much effect as Jeffrey’s and rather than raising my blood pressure by thinking about the idiots, I’d rather be doing my (little) bit to stop quite so many people dying of TB. That said, do click through and have a read of Jeffrey’s column, because it does make very good sense.

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