Darwin, Vaccinations and Mexicans

Today I was printing up the posters at the library for the Hug Me, I'm Vaccinated campaign, which will hit Dragon*Con in a mere nine days. Nine!

While I was printing, the attendant came up to me, looked at the table where the posters were drying, and asked, "Whooping cough?"

"There's an epidemic in California right now. You know, I was reading something from the 1950s the other day [not really the other day, but it was Martin Gardner and it may have been from the 1960s], and the author was talking about how polio was being destroyed and soon whooping cough too would be a thing of the past. It's sad to think that such a clearly desirable, obvious and reachable goal wasn't met."

"California," he said, apparently making an awful connection in his head, "has the highest rate of illegals in the country." I did not want to get into that. I have no idea whether or not that is true and, if it is true, whether or not the illegals are vaccinated.

"Well, what we can address is whether or not people get their shots, so we're giving them out at Dragon*Con for free and letting people know that they need to have boosters. Most people probably don't even realize that they need boosters. Eight kids have died from whooping cough in California this season."

I wanted to say that foreigners and outsiders have always been associated with disease, usually unjustly. That the "infection" and "invasion" metaphors are often interlinked in conspiracist discourse, and that the most recent (and hilarious) version of this reflexively racist sort of thinking was Lou Dobbs' assertion that 7000 cases of leprosy were somehow associated with dirty filthy fucking Mexicans:

"Eight dead?" my new friend mused. "Darwin would have liked that."

"I'm sorry?"

"Well, survival of the fittest. That's what it's all about."

"Dead children? You know, his favorite daughter died from a disease that could have been prevented by a vaccine fifty years later. I can guarantee you that Darwin would have approved of the vaccine," I said. By the smirk on the attendant's face, I realized that in his mind I had just proved Darwin was a hypocrite somehow. "That's the thing," I continued, "You can't graft morality onto a law of nature. It happens whether or not Darwin approves of its effects. It happens regardless of whether or not Darwin discovers it. Heck, it sounds more like something his cousin would have said, but he was a eugenicist, trying to intelligently design a population, and that's not science. There is nothing in evolutionary theory to suggest it should be used to guide public policy."

Nothing. He just smiled.

"Let's say, for instance, that you were right," I tried, "that it is a matter of the survival of the fittest. Evolution happens not in individuals but in populations. As an adaptive species, it increases the fitness of everyone if we develop and use vaccines."

Nothing. He just smiled. Smiling is like a force field against reason. This is why I am such dour son of a bitch.

"And, now that I think about it, the outbreak is not limited to where there are high rates of illegal immigration, since Australia, which has taken some controversially draconian immigration stances in recent years..."

"That'll be $77," he said in that upper class Southern accent that often trips my gaydar even though the speaker has a wedding ring.

Other than apparently holding completely untenable political and pseudoscientific beliefs (imagine, thought reduced to talking points!), I thought that he was very nice and helpful and misguided. Totally not interested in talking about it.

Harumph,

HJ