August 7, 2019
Page 9
O
PINION
Vaccines Save Lives and Protect Future Health
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Rejecting the
misinformation
and the fear
M arian W right
e DelMan
I’ve never forgotten
my family’s sadness
over the senseless death
of my childhood neighbor little
Johnny Harrington, who lived
three houses down from our church
parsonage in segregated Bennetts-
ville, S.C. Johnny stepped on a
rusted nail and died of the result-
ing tetanus infection because his
by
hard-working grandmother had no
doctor to advise her nor the mon-
ey to pay for health care. Over the
last four decades the Children’s
Defense Fund has fought
alongside many others
to champion policies
and programs that work
to ensure every child in
America gets vaccinated
against preventable dis-
eases like tetanus, polio and mea-
sles.
Yet in 2019 headlines like
“New U.S. measles cases break
25-year-old record” are creating
fear and worry, especially among
parents. How can it be that we are
seeing more and more outbreaks
of a disease declared eliminated
in the United States nearly two de-
cades ago? The answer involves a
web of linked factors: the spread
of misinformation and falsehoods
by a small but vocal number of
vaccine opponents, gaps in vac-
cination coverage, and a national
and global increase in outbreaks
of vaccine preventable diseases.
The U.S. has already recorded
well over 1,000 cases of measles
this year—most of them occur-
ring in children. As we explain
in a new brief, this growing crisis
is putting our children at risk and
must be stopped.
The facts are simple: Vaccines
are safe. They are highly effec-
tive. They are supported by every
major American medical society
and government agency and are a
routine part of pediatric care. Yet
the growing number of outbreaks
suggests more must be done to
support immunization and halt the
spread of serious—and potentially
deadly—diseases. The bottom line
is that to stop the spread of mea-
sles and other serious diseases,
parents must have access to factu-
al information from trusted sourc-
es to combat fraudulent informa-
tion spread by the anti-vaccination
movement in the U.S. and around
the world.
To ensure that parents are
equipped with the facts, health
care providers, educators, chil-
dren’s groups, policymakers and
faith leaders must be vocal advo-
cates for vaccinations, and poli-
cies must support vaccination and
limit exemptions only to those
with legitimate medical reasons.
Why are vaccines so import-
ant? Vaccines save lives and pro-
tect against long-term health con-
sequences. They reduce disability
and suffering, contribute to longer
life expectancy, and help lower
C ontinueD on p age 11
Food Stamps Helped Me Get Back on My Feet
Cutting them is a
lose-lose
J ill r iCharDson
The Trump adminis-
tration has proposed a
rule that will cut an esti-
mated 3 million eligible
people off food stamps while depriving half
a million eligible children of school lunch.
I’ve been on food stamps.
I spent most of my life with mental illness,
and it was not diagnosed until a few years
ago. Not knowing there was a reason every-
thing was so difficult for me, I pushed myself
until I could push no more.
I got good grades in school, and went to
college on a scholarship. I got my degree and
then got a full-time job like I thought I was
supposed to.
I began getting severe migraines every
day at the age of 14. That was my body tell-
ing me that I was doing more than I could
handle and I needed to stop and heal. I had
a migraine every day for 23 years. Working
was hellish and painful, and I still tried.
When I could no longer handle an office
job, I tried being self-employed and working
from home. I could never make enough to re-
ally get by on. Then I went on food stamps. It
didn’t mean I could stop working. I got $70 a
month so I could eat, but I still had to pay rent
by
and put gas in my car, and for that, I worked.
Food stamps did its job for me. It helped
me get through a tough time until I could get
back on my own two feet.
I’m fortunate I didn’t have children. If I
did, my kids would have suffered through
my financial insecurity through no fault of
their own. But food stamps and school lunch
would have helped ensure they had a chance
in life despite being born to a mom too sick
to make ends meet.
While the moral righteousness of food
stamps justifies the program on its own, there
are other benefits to it as well.
Food stamps are a huge stimulus to the
economy. Families spend their SNAP ben-
efits to buy food from local businesses like
grocery stores, and that creates jobs — from
the store clerk stocking the shelves, to the
truck driver transporting the food, to the
farmers and ranchers producing the food.
For every $5 the U.S. government spends
on food stamps, it generates $9 in economic
activity. That’s an incredibly effective stim-
ulus.
Federal school breakfast and lunch pro-
grams do more than help food security too
— they help kids succeed. Imagine trying to
pay attention or take a test while you’re hun-
gry. School breakfast and lunch helps kids
from low income families break the cycle of
poverty when they grow up, because it helps
them benefit more from their education.
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The movement to cut low-income people
who are eligible for food stamps and school
lunch off of those programs isn’t just immor-
al, it’s short-sighted.
The Trump administration claims the
measure will save money because there will
be less federal spending on helping hungry
people eat. In addition to the cruelty of “sav-
ing money” by taking food from the hungry,
it will also ultimately harm the nation by
removing the economic stimulus that food
stamps provide and making it that much
harder for half a million already poor kids to
do well in school.
Forcing kids to go hungry is a lose-lose.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is
pursuing a PhD in sociology at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s currently
based in Montana. Distributed by Other-
Words.org.