A few weeks ago I decided to travel back home to surprise my mom.
The last time we met things didn’t go so well, so I figured I could make up with her
by returning back to the place of my childhood and handing her an unexpected birthday gift.
Her car was in the driveway so I knew she was home.
As soon as I walked through the door, gift in hand, I shouted, “GUESS WHOOO?”
No reply was forthcoming, which I thought was a bit strange, so I walked into the kitchen.
To my utter astonishment my co-creator was slumped in front of a laptop with her head
in her hands, her mascara running down her cheeks in the style of a Rorschach test.
“What’s up mother dearest,” I asked, after which she looked up and tearfully replied,
“I’m so, so sorry.”
“For what?”
I asked, feeling slightly concerned that she wasn’t my biological mother.
Swallowing painfully, her voice breaking, she cried, “I…I…I VACCINATED you.”
I stood there for a few seconds and made no effort to console her.
I’m generally a loving, hands-on, type of son, but I dreaded the thought of the discussion
to come.
Memories of our Flat Earth debate echoed around my head and I didn’t want to go through
that kind of ordeal again.
The gift that I’d brought her was a book called, “The Short History of Nearly Everything”,
which is sort of a science 101 for curious dummies.
I quickly abandoned that by the trash can.
Walking around to where my mom was again slouched, I bent down to see what she’d been consuming
on the Internet.
The page was difficult to read seeing as there were so many pop-up ads, but I managed to
see a piece of writing entitled, “Everything the Government Has Told You Is Wrong.”
“Ok, mom,” I said, “We need to talk…I’ll make some coffee and you go wash that mascara
off your face.”
What scared me was that when she reappeared from the bathroom there was a determined,
dare I say it, ferocious look painted across her face.
The woman had come to do battle, and I guessed my olive branch of a hot cup of coffee wasn’t
going to be enough to dampen her enthusiasm.
“So mom, what’s the big problem?“
I asked, and now feeling a bit reluctant, handed over that coffee.
“The problem,“ she replied emphatically, “is that I had you vaccinated when you were
just a small child…an innocent, unknowing child whose blood I defiled and corrupted.”
“Ah, ok, can you expand?”
She went over to a drawer and pulled out a binder from which she took some official-looking
medical papers.
She showed me those papers and I quickly went through them.
“So, I see I have been vaccinated against smallpox…”
“Among other things,” she said.
“And that’s a problem?”
She picked the worst one first of course and talked about how she’d given me the smallpox
vaccine when there wasn’t really any need.
“The Most Dangerous Vaccine in the World!” she shouted, “And I put that filth into
you...My only son...Oh God, please forgive me.”
“Ok mom,” I said, “Listen to this.
You’re right about the smallpox vaccine being one of the worst out there and I admit
that out of around every one million people who got vaccinated maybe one would die and
70-something others would get seriously sick, but from 1880 to 1980 about half a billion
people died from smallpox.
I’m glad you gave me the vaccine, even though I was one of the last people in the U.S. to
have it done mandatorily.”
“I could have killed you,” she intoned quietly.
“Yep, and you could have dropped me on my head…smothered me in your armpit…or given
me free reign to explore the basement so I ended up eating rat poison or drinking Drano,
but you took good care of me, and that included adhering to medical science facts when it
came to vaccines.”
“Ok, humor me and tell me what good they’ve done,” she said.
I picked up that book I had bought her and since I’d read it I knew where to find the
chapter on vaccines.
I showed her the bit about the Spanish Flu and how it killed something like 50 to 100
million people at the start of the 20th century.
There were no flu vaccines back then, I told her, and dramatically lifting my arms in the
air I shouted, “Praise the lord we have them now.”
She wasn’t impressed with my theatrics.
This flu had a massive impact on life expectancy just in the U.S., I said, and pointing to
some lines in the book I showed her that during World War One about 80 percent of U.S. military
deaths were not from bullet holes or bomb blasts or bayonets, but from flu.
I told her that since we now have vaccines to prevent certain kinds of contagions from
happening again, we can probably on average look forward to hitting 80 in the good ole
USA….well, late 70s I said, depending on how we deal with opiods and obesity.
“You’re so brainwashed,” she said, “Just like the rest of them.
I hate to say it, but I gave birth to an idiot.”
Ouch!
“If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions,” I told her
smiling because I’d stolen that line from a Quentin Tarantino movie.
She then got up and frantically ran around the kitchen opening cupboard doors and swiping
her finger on surfaces.
With a huge grin on her face she pointed at each heavily stocked level of the refrigerator.
“What do you see?” she asked without waiting for an answer.
“You see clean, nutritious food.
You see surfaces wiped with cleaning agents.
You see everything that tells you that the reason so many people died of diseases back
then was NOT vaccines, but the fact a lot of people had poor living standards.
The world has changed, and that’s why there will be no repeat of the Spanish Flu pandemic.”
I told her that there was a lot of truth in that, but vaccines have also helped.
A case in point is the fact the number of measles victims was profoundly reduced after
the first measles vaccine of 1963.
I told her that if you have that vaccine now the chance of dying from measles is 0.01 percent.
“This has been proven to be an incredibly safe vaccine,” I said, now feeling annoyed
since she was sitting across from me with her arms folded, smirking.
“In the 1960s about 3,000 Americans died from measles and now the number is pretty
much negligible to none.
It used to kill millions around the world, and in fact, if you go back to 1980 over four
million people died worldwide from measles.
In 2018, the number was about 140,000.
And you know why my dear life-giver, BECAUSE…OF…VACCINES.”
She then picked up a piece of paper she had printed out and on it was a photo of a young
man with his doting mother.
The word printed above the pair in bold was, “VACCINE APOCALYPSE.”
“See that,” she said, “That woman claims that the measles vaccine gave her son autism,
and you know what, she’s not alone.
And before you get smart, articles have been published in scientific literature about this
FACT…
What do you have to say to that?”
I could see the woman grinding her teeth, which was worrying to say the least.
This issue was so important to her that I imagined the stress related to her impregnable
conviction would get her before any disease would.
“Have you taken your anti-psychotic medicine,” I asked.
“What medicine?”
“The stuff you obviously need to be taking…”
She just glared at me.
“Sorry, I said, just kidding…Ok, let me inform you that the article you’re referring
to was later retracted.
I’m not saying that this kid you are showing me doesn’t have autism, but the condition
is neurodevelopmental and its generally influenced by genetics.
Since that paper came out, anti-vaxxers have been waving it around like a flag at the Disease
Olympics, but numerous, and I mean numerous, studies have shown the connection to be indubitably,
incontestably, unchangeably WRONG.”
She told me about Big Pharma and its many lies and corruptions, about its nefarious
shareholders and malignant band of diabolical lobbyists.
She told me about the conspiracy to dumb down the populace and make us sick; how we are
manipulated like marionettes by the dirty invisible hands of the unfeeing elite.
“Mom,” I said in a low tone, feeling worn-out already.
“I share your fear that Big Pharma with its many billions in profits can sometimes
be unscrupulous in its business practices.
I am aware that greed plagues our planet, but I also know that there are hardworking
researchers all over the world that are developing vaccines to help mankind.”
I picked up the piece of paper she had shown me.
“You see this kid…Well, he and others now have more chance of getting measles because
of the anti-vaxxer junk you are all swallowing.
There have been recent outbreaks because of this nonsense and there is data that you can
easily find about that.”
She then told me that lots of vaccinated kids still get measles and other diseases.
At that moment I knew I needed something she could relate to, so I pulled out that huge
jar of M&Ms we have.
I emptied the thing on the table.
From the whole I separated about five pieces.
“Ok ma, so these five candies represent unvaccinated kids in a school and the rest
of the bunch are vaccinated.
Let’s say there is a huge outbreak and everyone is susceptible.
Now, those five kids without the vaccine got infected, but since not every kid responds
to the vaccine, about 12 vaccinated kids got it.
Anti-vaxxers might say, well, that just proves that more kids can get it even when vaccinated,
but that’s fuzzy logic, because A LOT more kids would have got it if they hadn’t been
vaccinated.
Now consider a world of billions of M&Ms.”
I just knew by the expression on her face that she wasn’t getting that at all.
“Look mom, sometimes you just have to go with the literature.
Come with me…”
I take her out to the garden and give a cliched lecture which I hope will allay her anger
and fear.
“The sun is shining; the grass is green…look around you and take in this thing we call
nature.
You have to get out of your head and enjoy life.
Sure it’s alluring to think a Bad Big Brother is pulling strings and is warring against
the common man, but this line of thinking is going to drive you crazy.”
I thought that might have done the trick, but then she surprised me and pulled out a
picture of a baby and shoved it in my face…this blocked the sun for a second, giving my metaphor
some amount of credence.
“That’s baby Gregory,” she said, “He died an infant soon after being vaccinated
for Diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
How do you explain that oh-so-smart son of mine.?”
For a moment I felt like pushing her in the fish pond that my dad built before he took
off.
“Mom, correlation does not imply causation.
Of course a bunch of kids are going to die in their infancy, but that just happens regardless
of if they’ve been vaccinated.
Deaths that can be linked directly to vaccination are so rare there isn’t even any data.
Sure, a kid might get sick after a vaccination, but he might have gotten sick anyway.
“You think you know everything!” she shouted.
“No,” I replied coolly, “I am not young enough to know everything.”
I could see she thought that sounded clever, but she was unaware of the fact I was quoting
Oscar Wilde again.
We went back indoors since her world I now understood was not a world of nature and laws
and reason and facts, but an underworld of cynicism and paranoia, a world inhabited by
ghosts and ghouls, superstition and evil overlords.
“Have you ever actually been to a lab,” I told her, “because I have.
I have friends who work ungodly hours trying to understand viruses.
They have no stake in Big Pharma and they aren’t purposefully trying to handicap innocent
kids.
These researchers are everywhere, if you ever cared to leave the house and talk to them.”
She suddenly looked at me meaningfully, lovingly, like the mom I used to know before she spent all day
clicking refresh on dubious health blogs and social media pages
She stared into my eyes, and I was just about to walk forward and embrace her
when she murmured,
“I could have killed you.”
Mom, you gave me life and you protected me and I am grateful for that.
You vaccinated me and cared for me and I am also grateful for that.
Thank you.
I love you.”
Things calmed down after this confession and as a kind of peace offering I told her I’d
cook her favorite meal for both of us, a delicacy for which I’d picked up the ingredients
at the city’s new International Imported Food Market.
I then got to work on her beloved duck soup.
Later that evening we were both watching the latest on climate change on TV news and with
a feather sticking out her mouth she shook her head from side to side, growling.
“What’s wrong,” I said, “did I not make it right this time?”
She spit that feather back into the dish.
“No,” she replied, “the soup’s great but this climate change hoax gets right under
my skin.”
Just in case any of you missed our first show about the time this guy had to argue with
his mother over a conspiracy theory, have a look at this, “Why Flat Earthers Are Dead
Wrong”, or if you are ready for something similar, take a look at this, “What Happens
At & What Do We Know About Area 51?”