I shouldn’t have to write this article at all. Even someone with a single doctorate and not 3 doctorates each from separate but equally prestigious universities, as well as an honorary doctorate in Medical Ethics, back when Medical Ethics was in its nascent even fetal stages, before even Harvard had a Medical Ethics department, let alone an endowed chair, should be able to explain the importance of vaccines. It shouldn’t take someone whose mentor was shortlisted for the Nobel-prize like me.
Even someone without a doctorate, with only a mere masters in something as basic as chemical engineering should be able to explain how simple and absolutely without question is the fact that every child should absolutely be vaccinated with every possible and applicable vaccine.
Upon returning from my private and state of the art remote cellular genetics laboratory last week to begin the first day of my first six month sabbatical in almost six years, i happened to spy a headline about a resurgence of measles amongst the unvaccinated in Washington State. As a pioneering researcher of vaccines for as yet undetected viruses, I don’t spend a lot of time engaging in the present of today’s hoi polloi. My work is not merely to anticipate future viruses, but to create them, to speed their evolution at such a pace so that no permutation would go unanticipated.
As such today’s viruses mean as much to me as slight cough in upper balcony of the Philharmonic would to Conductor Phillips DeLaTonte during the central passage of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Which now that I say it, bothered me quite a bit being that I was in the executive suite right across from that mouth breather who couldn’t even be bothered to raise a handkerchief let alone a hand to cover the effluent. I don’t think he knew at all how precious it was that DeLaTonte had left Montevideo to perform in America, being such a dedicated anti-hegemonist. I mean he said he never would, and then, here he is, and this bloated tardigrade can’t be bothered to suppress a longitudinal glandular reflex for half an hour.
Fortunately my cutting edge work is now done through AI modeling. We no longer grow out the viral pathogens in sheep’s blood like we did back in the dark ages of the late 90s. I had the great fortune of having both Sergey Brin and Qal Shuipen as students, both brilliant computer scientists and really phenomenal thinkers.
Both vaccinated.