Back when I was a kid in the 1960s, there were certain rights of passage that youngsters went through as a part of growing up. Among these were certain childhood illnesses that got passed around. Everybody (or nearly everyone) got measles and chicken pox. Most got the mumps, though I didn’t and hopefully won’t be exposed to it as an adult, when it is worse.

Measles kept you out of school for a week or so, as I recall. I remember I was sick enough I stayed in bed and the old black-and-white portable TV was wheeled to the foot of my bed so I could watch one of the three channels (actually four, because in southeast Michigan, we got the Canadian channel also). I remember a lunch tray with chicken noodle soup and crackers.

A generation later, I remember my late first wife and I giving our kids baths with oatmeal when they got chicken pox. They are, or at least should be, the last generation to experience those illnesses and more due to the incredible invention of vaccines.

Should be the last generation.

Stripped of political chimera, the facts are simple and clear: vaccines have been the greatest lifesaver ever crafted by humans. Just since 1974 (the year I started high school), the World Health Organization estimates 154 million people have avoided death (and significant illness) from those bugs my generation spread around elementary schools every year.
One of the greatest inventions dealt with the dreaded polio virus that caused fear every summer in the hearts of parents. My oldest brother, a full 12 years older than me, got sick with polio in the 1950s, and would be the only little kid on his hospital ward to survive, albeit with lifelong effects. By the time I reached school age, I just had to eat a sugar cube the doctor put a drop of medicine on, and I was immunized.

And then the anti-vaxxers arrived.

This group of fools and arrogant self-appointed “experts” have waged war against kids getting a full panel of vaccines, making all kinds of claims about the alleged “dangers” of vaccines, even as those claims of supposed dangers have been proven false. The most common claim has been mercury in vaccines causes autism. Well, it doesn’t. And regardless, it’s been 25 years or so since any vaccine actually used mercury as a preservative. Why have autism rates gone up? Better diagnosis and testing. I remember a couple of kids in my elementary school who were “odd,” and in hindsight, I strongly suspect they were undiagnosed autistics, and it’s a shame they didn’t get the help they needed so badly.

All this just to say that I’m very proud of my old boss, U.S. Sen. Micheal Bennet, as reported in Colorado Politics. You may have seen part of the hearing last week wherein Bennet excoriated Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., likely the worst pick in a Trump cabinet filled with utterly unqualified people. Kennedy has long been an anti-vaxxer, though he claims now to not be one. Yet his actions, and the actions he has allowed his name to be attached to, have dramatically weakened the vaccine protection our kids used to get automatically.

And this is far more than a pity, it’s an immoral and reprehensible set of actions that will result in kids dying, either directly from the illnesses we thought we wiped out, or from being an immune-compromised person who relies on a level of herd immunity to survive.

Bennet called Kennedy out on a variety of concerns, including Kennedy’s firing of the entire vaccine panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You know, those true experts who figure out each year which strains of flu the flu shot will protect against, and others such as the most recent (and dangerous) strain of COVID. But don’t worry, Kennedy has appointed a bunch of folks who think vaccines don’t actually work, so I’m sure we’ll be fine, unless, say, you or someone you love gets sick with an illness that was easily preventable.

I’ve saved one illness to the last to talk about, and that is whooping cough, or Pertussis. Nearly wiped out by vaccines, whooping cough is coming back. It was almost eliminated, until some parents, egged on by bad science, fought to get mandatory vaccinations eliminated because, well, they believed bad science. Besides, how bad can it be?

Please take a moment — the clip is only 10 seconds long — and listen to this audio clip of a youngster with whooping cough. And then please imagine that this gasping for breath, and the cough, and the fear that the next breath might not be enough, going on for hours and hours and hours. All this misery could have been prevented by a simple vaccine.

Please listen to this clip now, I’ll wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbGOP0NJOQw.

Florida just banned all vaccine mandates, so this pathetic sound, along with measles, mumps and rubella, are soon to come roaring back in the Sunshine State. You may want to rethink a visit there, especially if you have kids.

Thank you, Sen. Bennet, for so clearly calling RFK Jr. out on his nonsense. I hope it changed minds, and perhaps a kid or two in Colorado won’t have to suffer needlessly. Sadly, in MAGA World, the innocent kids there may soon be sick with preventable diseases and even gasping for breath.

And that’s more than just a pity.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.