Off the Cuff: Vaccines

I suppose it’s about time for a fresh restatement on this business of vaccines. The concept in itself isn’t that bad, but it won’t work for everything. Give someone’s body a very limited exposure to a weakened version of some infectious agent and the body tends to build defenses as a reaction that makes us immune to that thing when we encounter it in full strength. It does work that way for some maladies. It won’t work for everything.

Sometimes it’s just impractical. Flu shots, for example, are a waste of time because the flu mutates awfully fast. And the labs that make the vaccine have to guess on which strain is going to bust out on us in the coming year and prepare the vaccine in advance. The process itself, incubating a vaccine in eggs, is fraught with all kinds of problems in the first place. People typically get flu symptoms from the vaccine itself, and often worse than the flu it protects against. But the flu virus they capture early in the year is seldom close enough to what we actually face later on. I’m not going to footnote all these problems; you probably already ran across it on the Net somewhere.

The worst problem is the vaccine makers: They aren’t good people. Their whole game is profit, and it tempts them too much to cut corners. They’ve been caught at it too many times. Their big money inevitably buys political and legal influence to protect them; they’ve been caught at that, too. And in recent years they’ve been adding something called adjuvants that have done more damage than good, all perfectly legal, of course. They promote marketing that inflates the threat of flu sickness. Their favorite tactic is to talk up the numbers of flu cases, hoping you won’t check to see that the numbers are actually down this year. Need I mention that the vast majority of illnesses initially diagnosed as flu, when actually tested in lab, turn out to be something else entirely?

What’s craziest of all is the false dichotomy that you have to go with one side or the other in the very nasty public debate. Has anyone else noticed that there are liars and hucksters running things on both sides? The antivax activists are all out to make buck, too. Some of them are frankly criminal shysters who carefully tiptoe around the legal boundaries to avoid indictment (like Ty Bollinger). These people are riding a very justified skepticism to make a big profit selling equally dangerous non-pharmaceutical poisons.

It’s real simple: Pray and do a little research. Try to brace yourself for pernicious lies from profit-seeking hucksters on both sides. We are fallen creatures, damaged goods with a distinct mortality. You are going to die of something, so get used to the idea. After this life God’s children will rest awhile in His Presence, and then He’s bringing us all back to spend time on the same planet earth, but without the fallen nature and without mortality. The natural world is looking forward to it, Paul says in Romans 8. Creation isn’t fallen; we are. We’ll come back and eat of the Tree of Life and not have to worry about such things because we will have a full enlightenment. In the mean time, learn to trust your heart. If something kills you, bless the Lord’s name and go home. We’ll figure out how to live on without you, waiting our turn.

Now, can we all ditch this fearful panic, as if health problems or death in this rotten old flesh is something awful? Let your heart rule. Trust in God, because Creation — including diseases — continue to obey His will. And if you obey His will, too, then things should work out as He planned. It’s all for His glory in the first place.