Working as a technical contractor a few years ago I was offered a position working for a major computer company doing a refurbish of computer equipment inside the patient rooms and at nurse’s stations at one of our best hospitals. I completed all of the forms required for employment but before I could begin work I had to have a current MMR vaccine, for the prevention of measles, mumps and rubela. Without the vaccine I could not take the job.

When I was a child we had to have a polio vaccination to attend public school. Before the vaccine was available children did not go swimming. My mother never learned to swim because they weren’t allowed to go in the water when she was growing up, the risk of contracting polio was too great.

When traveling abroad as a teenager I had to carry proof of vaccinations, not to travel but to return to the United States. I still have the booklet with all of my ‘shots’ listed in it, filled out by my pediatrician.

So vaccinations are nothing new, but the outcry against them is. I happen to have family members who follow a religious practice that does not rely on medicine for healing. Even those devout family members took vaccinations when required to, for school attendance or to enter the army during WWII. And I can tell you positively that there are not enough truly religions objections to make up the numbers of vaccination protesters, those religious groups are, and always have been, very small in the US, thousands but certainly not millions of followers. It would be very easy to check, the churches keep records of those who attend. If that happened you would find that most of the so-called ‘religious objectors’ have never attended a church whose beliefs would cause them to forego medical treatment.

So what it boils down to is that we just don’t want to be told what to do, that we don’t trust our government to govern us. That is a real shame and I suspect that right now there is no one on earth that most Americans would trust, except maybe Santa Claus. Which pretty much sums up the national status right now, we are all acting like a bunch of children. Whenever we have faced crisis before we have done it together, as a nation. After 9/11, people were kind to total strangers, there was a sense of ‘us’ and not ‘us and them’. Now, we are fighting each other when we need to get together and fight the enemy, which is a disease that is causing major disruptions to our society. If we get rid of the disease we move forward, everyone gets back to work, the supply chain heals and the good things in life that we enjoy in such abundance are restored to us. That has always been the great thing about America, is that now matter how different we are, we are united.