The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

I offer, here, a few words of history that were overlooked when you were in school. 

Diseases have been master killers throughout human history. There was no defense against the misery, death, and sorrow until modern medical science developed vaccines, antibacterial medicines, and other methods to prevent or treat diseases.

 Historian William Manchester reports that during the Middle Ages “… half the people in Europe died, usually from disease, before reaching their thirteenth birthday.”

 Vaccines do not ordinarily eradicate a disease, but smallpox may be an exception. Biologist Joshua S. Loomis writes that “Smallpox is one of the greatest scourges that the human race has ever known, killing and disfiguring billions of people over the course of 3,000 years.” An aggressive worldwide vaccination program tackled smallpox. The last reported case was in 1978. Eradication was possible because humans are the only known species that hosted the disease.

Do you know anyone who died from bubonic plague, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, pertussis, polio, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, or yellow fever? Do you know anyone who survived one of those diseases? Were it not for modern medical science, all of us would know someone who suffered from one or more of those diseases or maybe died as a result of contracting one of those diseases. Excepting smallpox, all of these diseases still exist, as well as many other contagious diseases. If we become careless, they could return.

As of July 27, 2021, Covid-19 has claimed the lives of 610,722 Americans. Using an infectious disease as a political wedge issue is one of the most irresponsible things that politicians have done in the history of our country.  

Recently, a political action committee representing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released a new political slogan accompanied by imprinted tee shirts: “Don’t Fauci my Florida.” Five days later, Florida was burdened with 10,700 new cases of Covid-19 and, now, an additional 73,000 cases during the past week. In the community where I live, 57 unvaccinated people are hospitalized with the disease. It is a safe guess that they have a newly acquired respect for the medical profession.

Jack Stevenson served two years in Vietnam as an infantry officer, retired from military service, and worked three years as a U.S. Civil Service employee. He also worked in Egypt as an employee of the former Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Now retired, he currently reads history, follows issues important to Americans, and writes commentary for community newspapers.