Right wingers love to portray Hollywood as a town full of kooky, out-of-touch, magically thinking space dopes (as opposed to the out-of-touch, racist, doomsday preppers who live in the real ‘Murica), and sadly, a lot of Hollywood residents spend all their time proving them right. Specifically the anti-vaxxer crowd, the left wing’s answer to birthers and chemtraileys. It’s gotten so bad that in wealthy parts of Los Angeles, reports The Hollywood Reporter, vaccination rates are on par with southern Sudan. Whooping cough is making a comeback, and domestic measles is at a 20-year high. But hey, at least we’re not living in NAZI GERMANY, isn’t that right, Rob Schneider?
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is at the front line, with 72 pertussis [whooping cough] patients this year. “A number of them have been in the ICU and very, very sick,” says CHLA infectious disease specialist Dr. Jeffrey Bender. “They cough so hard, it turns into vomiting and broken ribs; they end up intubated, to ventilate their lungs.
Although whooping cough was once a national scourge, killing more than 1,100 in 1950, decades of immunizations — the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccine and its forerunners — almost eliminated the disease. Only six Americans died of pertussis in 1995. Alas, an epidemic has arrived. (One case of pertussis typically can cause at least a dozen secondary transmissions because it is so communicable. Antibiotics do little to ameliorate the symptoms, except to shorten the period of infectiousness.) Medical officials are increasingly alarmed — especially here in L.A. No other county in California has more cases: 1,317 so far this year. “It’s a smoldering fire that has started and it could be a complete wildfire if vaccination rates continue to fall,” says Dr. Deborah Lehman, associate director of pediatric infectious diseases at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The problem, it seems, is “PBEs,” Personal Belief Exemptions, which you can get instead of vaccinations if you want to infect the sane parents’ kids with deadly diseases so you can flip the bird to the mercury octopus who gives autism with his needle limbs.
[…] Whether it’s measles or pertussis, the local children statistically at the greatest risk for infection aren’t, as one might imagine, the least privileged — far from it. An examination by The Hollywood Reporter of immunization records submitted to the state by educational facilities suggests that wealthy Westside kids — particularly those attending exclusive, entertainment-industry-favored child care centers, preschools and kindergartens — are far more likely to get sick (and potentially infect their siblings and playmates) than other kids in L.A. The reason is at once painfully simple and utterly complex: More parents in this demographic are choosing not to vaccinate their children as medical experts advise. They express their noncompliance by submitting a form known as a personal belief exemption (PBE) instead of paperwork documenting a completed shot schedule. [TheHollywoodReporter]
I for one am proud of this brave stand against the lizard people our nation’s brave entertainment workers are making. If you let the lizard Hitlers kill your kid’s whooping cough, and the next thing you know, they’re using the fluoride in our water to power Xenu’s soul tractor. And f*ck that, he uses his Kabbalah beam to give you wrinkles! Anyway, this fight against the tyranny of unmeasled skin involves all of us, and if we have to lose a few Apples or Moon Units in the battle against the great space satan, so be it. Do your worst, you invisible ancient volcano monkey.