Page 4A
East Oregonian
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
TIM TRAINOR
Opinion Page Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Immunization opt-out
carries a risk for all of us
P
ublic health is one of America’s
great accomplishments. It is
difficult in 2018 to imagine a
time when cities and towns commonly
had open sewers. Or a time when
diseases such as whooping cough,
measles, tuberculosis, influenza and
polio cut broad swaths through the U.S.
population.
Americans broadly think little of
public health these days. If anything,
we demean public health through the
budget process.
Too many Americans have also
forgotten the effects of childhood
vaccinations — another of public
health’s great accomplishments. Paris
Achen of our Capital Bureau recently
reported that the percent of Oregon
parents declining vaccination for their
children has ticked upward. This is in
the face of the 2013 Oregon Legislature,
which made the process of opting out
of childhood vaccination more difficult.
The new law requires an education
process prior to opting out.
But, as Achen reported, “…education
efforts face a daunting popular culture
belief that immunizations can cause
autism and other problems.” A 1998
article in the British medical journal The
Lancet became the touchstone for those
with fear of childhood vaccinations. It
asserted that vaccination was linked to
an incidence of autism.
Though that research was debunked
12 years later by considerable peer
review, the power of social media keeps
the bogus theory alive.
Some parents also maintain an
illusion that their children have
“good immunity” and thus do not
need protection from disease. In fact
children, pregnant women and older
adults have a less robust immune
response to any infectious agent.
With more unvaccinated children
and adults in the population, there have
been outbreaks of measles and even
whooping cough. Achen noted that
“More than a dozen students in Lane
County, including two at the University
of Oregon in Eugene, contracted
whooping cough earlier this spring.
In December, about a dozen cases of
the disease were reported at schools in
Clark County, Washington.”
The Center for Disease Control
reports that “2012 was the record year
with more the 48,000 cases of whooping
cough, the most cases that CDC has
seen in the past 60 years. Prior to
vaccinations the U.S. had 200,000 cases
per year.”
EO file photo
A registered nurse gives a dose of a meningitis vaccination to a student in February
at the Umatilla County Health Department office in Hermiston.
The CDC notes that most of the
deaths each year are in babies younger
than 3 months of age. Even healthy
babies can be very ill because of an
immature immune system that is
still developing. It is important that
pregnant women get the whooping
cough vaccine during each pregnancy,
so that the mother transfers the greatest
amount of protective antibodies to her
child.
It is important to note, states the
CDC, that babies with whooping cough
don’t cough at all. Instead it causes
them to stop breathing and turn blue.
Other complications include violent,
uncontrolled shaking, life-threatening
pauses in breathing, and brain disease.
It is useful to remember the past.
For instance, it is common in pioneer
cemeteries to see a row of headstones
marking children’s deaths in one winter
from chicken pox and whooping cough.
The scientific philosophy of
immunizing most of the population is
to keep the incidence of disease at a
minimum. That is because there always
are people in the population with poor
immune systems to fight off bacteria
and viruses that cause communicable
diseases. Those include babies, children,
pregnant women and older adults as
well as people with chronic diseases
and cancer. Health care workers are
immunized to help ensure that they
do not pass communicable diseases to
patients who are often in compromised
health status.
Thus vaccines were developed to
save lives. We are fools to forget that.
OTHER VIEWS
The great pop culture war
T
YOUR VIEWS
Violence can be stopped with
better social media vigilance
I wanted to talk about the gun issue and
people’s reaction to the school shootings.
I grew up around guns. My dad had
several. We were taught at a young age
how to shoot a gun and the dangers of and
harm guns can do.
Every year before Thanksgiving, Dad
would enter in a target shooting contest
and he would always take one of us
kids with him. He would usually bring a
shotgun, a black powder rifle and one or
two other guns. If you won an event with
a gun it was retired (you couldn’t use it
again). He would bring home two to three
turkeys he won every year and that was our
Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner for the
year. It was a highlight of the year for him.
I also know several people that hunt; if
you take away guns you take away hunting.
From what I see it isn’t really about
guns with the school shootings, it is about
mental health and mental illness. There
are clear warning signs. A example is their
Facebook pages and what they post. People
need to watch the kids’ Facebook pages
and what is posted there: what are they
wearing to school, their friends, and if they
seem to have issues. Get them help!
The other thing I see is courthouses
have a guard and metal detectors, and so
does the airport. Why not do that at the
high schools and middle schools? The
other thing is phones; when you go in the
courthouse they tell you leave your phone
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the
East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and
not necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
at home. Kids do not need their phones in
school either.
Lenore Moody
Milton-Freewater
Election loss doesn’t mean
end of service
Dear friends:
As you all know, I ran for the city
council position in Hermiston, Ward 1.
Sadly, I came in third. However, it was
an awesome experience. I loved meeting
many of you and sharing my vision as a
possible council member. I want to thank
Hermiston Herald and East Oregonian for
their support. I want to thank all those who
supported me and cast their vote for me.
I am going to continue to work behind
the scenes to help Hermiston to become
even a greater town to live in. I am on the
budget committee and I plan on attending
city council meeting and other meetings at
the ground floor level of development to
ensure that the community voice is heard.
At this time, I like to announce that I am
supporting Lori Davis for city council. I’ve
met with her and discussed her vision for
Hermiston. She has a humble spirit and a
listening ear. She will be a fine city council
member and representative of Ward 1.
Once again, a million thanks to you.
Love,
Jackie Linton
Hermiston
he last time I wrote about
attraction to celebrity ephemera,
Samantha Bee it was the
confusing an epiphenomenon of
summer of 2016, Hillary
progressivism’s cultural advantage
Clinton seemed likely to be the next
— the fact that most famous artists
president of the United States, and
and actors are left-wing — with the
liberals were very angry at Bee’s
institutional advantage itself.
fellow late-night host, Jimmy Fallon,
So conservatives stupidly place
for normalizing Donald Trump with
hopes in a right-wing Kanye or a
Ross
Trump-friendly Roseanne Barr. They
a relatively friendly interview.
Douthat convince themselves that celebrity
In response, I suggested that Bee
Comment
provocateurs will make America’s
and her fellow late-night liberal
campuses more conservative. They
shouters were actually doing more
make a cynical, race-baiting, adulterous
for the Republican nominee than was
campaign-finance fraudster like Dinesh
Fallon, because Trump’s appeal was in part
D’Souza a rich man after he abandons an
a reaction to a pervasive late-Obama-era
intellectual career for a Michael Moore-
politicization of pop culture — which was
encouraging Republican voting as a form of imitating grift — and then cheer when
Trump pardons D’Souza because it owns
cultural protest, and Trump voting as an act
the libs.
of transgressive rebellion.
All of this reflects a deep confusion
Many times since the 2016 election,
about how liberal cultural power actually
but in the last few weeks especially, I feel
works. It’s the steady circulation of ideas
like I’ve been cursed to live inside an
and money and people through cultural
exaggerated version of my own analysis.
institutions that really matter, not the famous
I thought I was just describing how trends
faces popping off on Oscar telecasts.
in pop culture can shape politics, but the
But the same confusion is on display
Trump presidency has demonstrated that
when the unemployment rate is low enough among liberal culture makers themselves,
who have reacted to Trump’s defeat by
and the ruling party’s policy cupboard bare
leaning into their most self-defeating
enough, entertainment can simply become
instincts. Cultural liberalism wins battles
politics and vice versa. Forget about culture
when its omnipresence just seems like the
war; this is the age of pop culture war, a
natural air we breathe. But direct political
version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with
hectoring plays against that strength;
all the Cold War substance taken out.
instead of the subtle nudge of a sitcom’s
implicit values it’s just a rich and famous
Kanye’s red-pilled, Kim’s with Trump,
person yelling at you, in a way designed
D’Souza’s pardoned, Bee’s not dumped,
to maximize ratings among progressives
Roseanne’s tweets and football wars, I
looking for catharsis.
can’t take it any more ...
And the fact that the business model
runs on those ratings means that even if
In part that’s because Trump himself
Samantha Bee wanted to preach to someone
is entirely a creature of the celebrity-
other than her choir, her imperatives as an
entertainment complex; this is the game
entertainer require constant milder variations
he’s always played and he has no interest
on calling Ivanka Trump the C-word ...
in playing any other. Past Republican
because for her viewers that’s what makes it
politicians exploited the gulf between
entertainment.
Hollywood and Middle America in order
Which, for ratings purposes, is fine.
to pursue specific policy agendas, or fought
(Although the economics work less well
with celebrities over specific issues —
when you start insisting that lousy-but-woke
Vietnam with Jane Fonda, out-of-wedlock
movies are actually good because online
births with “Murphy Brown.” But for
right-wingers hate them ... sorry, I digress.)
Trump, fighting with late-night hosts and
But all the entertainers “owning” Trump
pro athletes is an end unto itself; people in
are playing the same game that carried him
his administration have substantive goals,
to power, and that might keep him there
but to the president ratings and faves and
despite all the reasons he deserves to fall.
cancellations and boycotts are the real way
———
that you keep score.
Ross Douthat joined The New York
But it’s too simple to blame Trump
Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009.
when so many of his supporters clearly
love this style. Having lost so many cultural Previously, he was a senior editor at The
Atlantic.
battles, the right has developed a desperate
The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the
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