My Smallpox Vaccination Scar

Occasionally I’ll run across a nut who thinks the purpose of vaccinations is to reduce the population (and when I say nuts, I do mean nuts). You know – wipe out 90% of the people (which would return us to the about 1000 AD, including the wealthy who are supposedly behind this plot).

I have a smallpox vaccination scar on my left bicep. I remember getting it. The reason it’s a scar is because I was scratched with a needle, and it left a small round scar when it healed. I remember the scab turned green.

I think I was about nine or ten but I’m not sure.

No one has those scars anymore because there is no more smallpox. A lot of people used to die from smallpox and if they didn’t die it left horrible huge pockmarks on their face. Google them and you can see the pictures.

Entire villages of American Indians were wiped out by smallpox because the Indians had no natural immunity at all to European diseases. The Indians would flee the infected villages, not even stopping to bury the dead.

Some years ago I was at the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I encountered a children’s section in one corner where almost all of them had died of polio during the ‘50s. There were marbles stuck in the concrete grave markers and black-and-white pictures of the children.

I also remember drinking some sort of concoction to prevent polio. I also know an older woman who had polio as a child (she must be in her 70s by now). She said she spend seven years lying on her back and ended up in her 50’s in a wheelchair. Post-polio syndrome, she told me.

They used to put children in iron lungs (no one less than my age knows what they are) because they could barely breathe on their own. That’s what polio did to them.

One of my old girlfriends told me her aunt died at two years old of tetanus. Her father told her it was a horrible death (sometimes the spasms break bones). Of course there was no tetanus vaccine back then (had I been a doctor back then I would have told the parents I could end her suffering with a shot, which I suspect happened at times).

Smallpox, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, rabies – all gone.

I got what was called the DPT vaccine – diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus. Nasty diseases and all of them can kill you. The last one will kill you.

I remember reading in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book how the whole family came down with diphtheria at the same time and all of them almost died. They couldn’t even get out of bed.

I did get measles (all three kinds, and according to my mother I was about six months old when I first got the measles), mumps and chicken pox (parents used to take their children and have them sleep overnight in the same bed with kids who had those diseases. That’s how I got the mumps. I also got mononucleosis but that was from a girl – that’s why it was called “the kissing disease.” And that one made me anemic and exhaused for a month.)

During World War I more people died world-wide from the flu than were killed in the war. Some people would be okay one day and dead the next. My grandfather missed that one but did get malaria in Panama while in the Army.

The only problem with vaccinations is that they aren’t perfect. There will always be a vanishingly small minority who are damaged or die from a reaction. But that is balanced by those who aren’t damaged or die and in fact are saved from those things. Or would you prefer we still have smallpox and polio?

This doesn’t mean I think every vaccination is necessary. The idea of vaccinating a baby as soon as it pops out of the womb is ridiculous. It was done to my niece’s baby and he turned yellow for two weeks.

Still, I don’t understand what I call Conspironuts. Vaccinations have been around for hundreds of years – and in one form or another, a thousand) and suddenly they’re part of a conspiracy? I mean, what the hell? How can anyone be that demented to believe that?

Unfortunately the “mind” of a Conspironut cannot be changed, just the way the mind of someone who believes in chemtrails cannot be changed.

There are always (and always has been) people out there who truly believe there is some vast, world-wide conspiracy (some going back several hundred years), whose only purpose is to Do Evil. And to conquer the world, like Pinky and the Brain.

I don’t understand these people at all. But then, I’m not a Conspironut.