Stupid Tuesday questions, Anne Boleyn edition

David Schoon in reply to Russell Saunders says:

Hello there doc Russell Saunders ! You are not an easy person to track down , & I’m not sure at this point that you will even see this. As a grumpy old pediatrician myself, I have been reading your ” are anti-vaxers as crazy/stupid/dangerous/certifiable as they seem to be ” to which my answer is ” hoo boy, are they ever “!
I’ve been laboring in the underpaid trenches of general pediatrics in Connecticut roughly since god was a teenager, & have seen a good number of the diseases that you ( in vain I suspect given the rise in the loon index ) have not seen & hope you never do.
Where to begin ? Two cases of epiglottis due to H. influenza type “B” . Luckily, being older than dirt it wasn’t hard to figure out. The second case got pretty hairy when it turned out that both ENT’s were out of town . The supposed on call guy was in Hartford at the symphony. The on call gas passer was dragged in & managed to incubate the baby , while having an attack of hysteria at the same time.

Three cases of tetanus, all fatal. The scariest was a mother from central America who had never been immunized & her newborn baby who developed tetanus from the base of the cord. In spite of an attempt to control things by wide excision of the cord, the baby died at 12 days. The third was y our run of the mill unvaccinated 22 year old. Horrible deaths BTW.

A 20 year old unvaccinated female who was admitted to an open ward by her internist, who had never seen measles & thought she had mono. He put her on IV steroids (‘only about four days, not long enough to suppress her immune system ) , at which time she died. She did have enough time to infect roughly 8 children on the ward. I saw two of them in my office , the first one being from across the room as I walked in as an ” oh shit ” Dx. One of the younger peds called me over to his office to look at one of his patients & decide if this was a case of measles, which he had never seen , & which it was. These days the young ones will have a higher chance of seeing measles, 2 cases in the state so far this year.

I could go on, got lots more stuff, but the general conclusion is, yes , I have several of these nuts, one just stupid , one “god will protect me ” & one of the type that my daughter calls ” crunchies ” . These are the ones that are convinced that since they eat only organic foods, exersize properly & often, take a zillion vitamins and supplements, avoid contact with icky poor people who carry all these nasty diseases & don’t always have clean clothes, that they can’t possibly get anything bad. They are ” special ” .They become righteously indignant when I point out the assorted bugs & viruses out there don’t give a rats a*8 how special they are. These are the ones I would like to take out behind my office, shoot them, & bury them in an unmarked grave.

I do truly hope you see this rather long rant . If interested, my email is david.schoon at snet.net ( for some unknown reason my machine is refusing to accept the “at” abbreviation, so you would have to put it in without the spaces as usual ) if you are like me & have way too much to do & not enough time to do it, my ego isn’t that big , & I had the chance to burn off some adrenaline just writing this.

D schoonReport