Bernie Sanders Convenes Vaccine High Priest Roundtable

Bernie Sanders—Senate HELP Committee ranking minority member—just convened a roundtable of Vaccine High Priests, including Pontifex Maximus Paul Offit. The obvious objective of this roundtable discussion is to spread fear among the American people that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will take away their vaccines and send their children back to 19th and early 20th century conditions of childhood mortality.

It’s ironic that Senator Sanders has drunk the Kool-Aid of vaccine ideology, given his general posture of being suspicious of industrial and financial interests with well-funded lobbies on Capitol Hill. It seems likely he is aware that that Big Pharma has by far the biggest lobby on the Hill, but he apparently has a blind spot where vaccines are concerned.

Reviewing the literature on pediatric diseases in the 19th century, I see the major causes of death in children were:

1). tuberculosis,

2). diarrhea of infancy

3). bacillary dysentery

4). typhoid fever

5). scarlet fever.

6). diphtheria

7). lobar pneumonia.

Note that all of the above are caused by bacterial infections that have been almost entirely eradicated by advances in public sanitation and antibiotics.

As Stanford T. Shulman—Division of Infectious Diseases, Northwestern University, The Feinberg School of Medicine, The Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago—notes in his paper The History of Pediatric Infectious Diseases:

Inadequate sanitation, impure water and unsafe milk supplies all contributed very significantly to the spread of infectious diseases among infants and children, and particularly to those living in the very crowded circumstances that promote transmission.

I suspect it is impossible for the typical American mother today to begin to fathom the sheer horror of poor sanitation during this time in crowded tenement buildings in major American cities such as New York and Chicago, where several large families living on the same floor would share just one hallway water closet. Today, the mere sight of such a water closet would cause a young mother to vomit on her lululemon yoga tights and have nightmares for the rest of her life.

Likewise, at the turn of the century, the American milk supply for crowded cities was appalling. As Dr. Schulman noted:

An exceptionally important advance during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century was the result of efforts by concerned pediatricians and others to secure a safe and sanitary milk supply for infants). Nonbreast-fed infants experienced particularly high mortality rates, because much of the cow milk supply was “swill milk,” which came from cows fed only distiller’s mash, housed in incredibly filthy conditions, without fresh air, exercise or hay, many of which were also infected by bovine tuberculosis.

Job Lewis Smith, who was one of the first to differentiate rubella from rubeola and wrote several papers on neonatal tetanus, served as the second APS President in 1890, 18 years after he had written in his textbook that more than half of New York’s infants who were spoon-fed (i.e. not nursed or wet-nursed) in the summer, died before fall. He strongly urged milk sterilization and wrote and spoke about the dangers of artificial infant feeding.

In a 1675 letter, Isaac Newton famously wrote: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Nowadays our society gives all the credit for public health to vaccines developers, but all of them stood on the shoulders of hygiene pioneers such as Ignaz Semmelweis, John Snow, Job Lewis Smith, and above all, the civil engineers and builders who brought proper sewage channelization and clean water to our cities.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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