Sep 4, 2021 3 min read

It’s rare to turn on the news these days without hearing the word COVID, and for good reason. Sadly, even after three vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have been freely available for months, there are people who still refuse to roll up their sleeves and take it.

As a former data entry specialist and contact tracer for the Department of Health of Pennsylvania, it makes me feel like all of the months of hard work I’ve put in haven’t done anything. During my interview to get the job, I said that if I could save a single life, it’d make everything worth it.

Vaccination denial isn’t new to the era of COVID-19. According to The Guardian, critics of the medical procedure have been around since the advent of vaccination.

Before COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, one of the most popular modern movements of anti-vaccination stemmed from now-discredited Andrew Wakefield’s so-called “article” linking autism and the MMR vaccine.

As a young woman with high-functioning autism myself, I’ve been affected by vaccine hesitancy well before COVID.

Several studies have disproven Wakefield. For example, In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there was a study done by The Journal of Pediatrics that concluded: “Increasing exposure to antibody-stimulating proteins and polysaccharides in vaccines during the first two years of life was not related to the risk of developing ASD” (Frank DeStano, MD, M.P.H., Cristofer, S. Price, ScM, and Eric S. Weintraub, MPH, 2013).

If you’re looking for any parallels between COVID vaccine hesitancy and Wakefield, I point you in the direction of the CDC, which in 2019 reported, “During January to April, 704 measles cases were reported in 22 states … the median patient age was 5” and that “Increased global measles activity poses a risk to U.S. elimination.”

Also, let’s not forget the Disneyland outbreaks in 2014, where “among the California patients … only 7% had two doses, and 1% had three doses” (CDC, 2015).

I wonder what that sounds like … oh, yeah. I remember. It sounds a lot like ABC’s recent top story about “94% of patients were unvaccinated for COVID-19.” 

History really repeats itself, doesn’t it?

Despite this, some people still think that vaccines cause autism and would rather put their child in danger of getting a life-threatening illness. As if they think that the very existence of autistic people is worse than fatal diseases like measles, smallpox, and now COVID.

I’d say “imagine if people said this about any other minority group,” but then I realize I wouldn’t put it past people who are this close-minded.

As a member of the LGBTQ community as well, I could sadly see someone say, “I’d rather my child die of smallpox than be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, or queer”.

Bigots are bigots.

Though if after all of this you’re too stubborn to get your vaccine, you’re not just risking harm to yourself, but to future generations as well. 

The rest of us want to live in the 21st century, not the 17th.

Morgan Boyer

Pittsburgh