Well…with the huge outbreak of whooping cough in Traverse City over the past couple of weeks, we are seeing the results of the misguided efforts on the right to cater to the anti-vax crowd and their wrongheaded idea that vaccines cause autism. A few years back, the repubs here in Michigan effectively gutted the herd protections that vaccines bring by allowing parents to opt out by just filing a paper with the state saying they object to vaccinating their kids for any reason whatever…and this is what we got from that law…hundreds of cases of whooping cough, measles, mumps, and other preventable diseases that were on the verge of eradication before people started to believe that vaccines were a plot or a danger to their kids…driven mostly by fox news and fear mongers there. I just want every parent that wants to not vaccinate their kids to be shown the pictures of the polio epidemic before the Salk vaccine was invented and see the death and destruction that occurred before this breakthrough.  I have vaccinated all of my kids with no reservations whatsoever…I still remember how sick I was with mumps and measles when I was a kid before the advent of vaccines for those diseases and surely didn’t want my kids to go through it…for the sickness or even the deaths that came from these diseases…I hope people come to their senses and vaccinate their kids…if they don’t, they put everyone at risk and I don’t think it’s their decision to make…geez….