Italy weakening its child vaccination law is a broader part of the retreat from science and knowledge that’s happening in Italy, the United States and elsewhere

By Marc Sample 

More bad news this week for the children of the world. Italy is relaxing its child vaccination law, which means fewer Italian children will get the basic panel of vaccinations needed to protect them from some very terrible diseases such as polio, diphtheria and Hepatitis B.

Universal vaccination would pretty much wipe out virtually all ten of the diseases against which the Italian government wants all children to get vaccinated. A recent Italian law requires all parents and guardians to provide written proof that their children have been vaccinated against these ten ailments. The law followed an outbreak of more than 5,000 cases of measles in Italy in one year, 34% of all cases in the half billion person European Union, an outsized number: Italy’s population represents only 12% of the EU. The medical community in Europe and around the world was delighted by the new legislation.

But the new Trump-like League- Five Star coalition government of Italy has decided to loosen the rule.Now parents will only be required to confirm verbally that their children have received vaccinations against these ten scourges.  Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and member of the anti-immigrant, far-right League, has been quoted as saying the ten obligatory vaccinations “are useless and in many cases dangerous, if not harmful….I confirm the commitment to allow all children to go to school.

With that kind of encouragement, we can be certain that lying will go up and child vaccinations will go down. Sadly, illnesses and deaths among Italian children will soar.

The ten diseases, BTW, are polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, haemophilus influenzae B, measles. mumps, rubella, whooping cough and chickenpox. 

The origin of the contemporary anti-vaccination movement in both Italy and the United States was a fraud perpetrated on the medical community and the families of the world by a British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield in 1995. Wakefield published a study in The Lancetclaiming children who had the Mumps/Measles/Rubella vaccination were more likely to have bowel disease and autism. He followed it up with another article in 1998. But the good doctor had cooked the books. By 2004, the medical community realized that Wakefield was full of it. That hasn’t stopped anti-vaxers from spouting his bogus research ever since.

When a celebrity or politician talks nonsense about the supposed dangers of vaccination, well-meaning, uneducated parents listen and sometimes decide not to vaccinate, putting both their children and the entire community in danger. That’s why I still believe that while it came early in his campaign, perhaps the most odious, horrific lie that Donald Trump has told to the American people was when he claimed in a debate that he personally knew someone whose child became autistic after being vaccinated. Impossible. Overwhelming clinical evidence proves beyond all doubt that there is absolutely no connection, correlation or relationship between vaccinations and autism. Trump was telling a lie that, like all Trump lies, a sizeable slice of the American public willingly will swallow in one gulp. How shameful to put children at risk to pander to a disproven idea.

But Trump routinely puts children at risk, sometimes with the sadistic glee of a cat batting a mouse around between its paws. The current Nationdetails five distinct ways that his administration imposes “sometimes fatal burdens of children—especially black and brown ones.”The article mentions the separation of children from their families at borders; the travel ban which, as it turns out, has a disproportionately negative effect on children; work requirements for recipients of health and welfare aid; a rolling back of Department of Education efforts to rein in unfair disciplining of African-American children; and efforts to scuttle the World Health Organization resolution favoring breastfeeding. Bullies always pick on people who can’t fight back, so it makes sense that Trump and his followers target children for their cruelty.

The tragedy of what will happen to many children is not the only alarming aspect of this change in the Italian law. The news media is reporting that the medical and scientific community believes that the statements of government officials and the vote to loosen the law increases distrust of science in Italy.  

Americans know, or don’t know, something about the distrust of science. The mass media has been sowing it for years by giving coverage to wacky theories like vaccinations cause autism; treating global warming as an open questions years after science decided the issue; giving a platform to creationists; routinely denigrating intellectual endeavors; writing in feature story after feature story that school is boring; and attributing negative traits to intelligent people, e.g. socially maladroit, physically unattractive, unathletic, unstylish and awkward.

Trump, of course, has taken this anti-truth, anti-science crusade to a new level. This failed businessman turned celebrity routinely lies and uses those lies to develop and implement policies that flaunt science and scientific research. He and his administration make up lies about immigrant crime, the unfairness of current trade agreements, climate change, the renting of children to allow bad guys to cross borders, the benefit to the economy of tax cuts, the reasons behind epidemic of mass shootings, and just about everything else.  The latest addition to the hit parade of mendacity is the claim that dropping the gas mileage standards on trucks and car will benefit the economy. Trumpites have a deep distrust in experts of all kinds, especially experts who speak against their cherished beliefs, superstitions and prejudices. 

The death of newspapers. The rise of the irrational as a force in social media. The decline in the number of people reading books. The gutting of scientists and other professional experts from key government positions. The continued decline in government support of public schools and colleges. Everywhere we see signs of a retreat from knowledge.

It’s happened before in world history, for example in Western Europe after the death of Charlemagne when most intellectual endeavors retreated to monasteries under the auspices of a superstitious church or during the later years of the Song dynasty when the examination system to decide who would run the country was corrupted by wealthy people wanting to make sure their children were well-positioned. Willful ignorance of the facts on the ground is probably a significant factor in the decline of all civilizations and countries. Decline always comes with extreme pain, and those who suffer most are almost always the children.

The real tragedy of separating children from their parents will come years from now when the kids suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

By Marc Jampole

These past few days, I’ve been feeling a special empathy with the children whom the United States government ripped from their families at the border and sent to special facilities. My empathy comes from knowing in the most intimate way possible some of the emotional challenges that these children will face throughout their lives.

You see, I’ve been having one of my occasional bouts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by traumatic events I suffered during my childhood. My PTSD manifests itself as sudden feelings of unexplained anxiety or full-blown panic attacks in which I lose all control of my ability to focus, have hot and cold flashes at the same time, feel as if I’m going to burst out of my skin, and am unable to focus on anything. I’ll spend hours alternatively pacing and trying to remain still long enough to get some work done or sleep. I sometimes also experience sudden feelings of guilt, shame and anger, all typical of survivors of war, natural disasters, epidemics, famine, family suicide or childhood trauma.

My occasional symptoms are not the only manifestations of PTSD that inflict sufferers. Far from it. Here are some worse ones: Substance abuse, flashbacks, bad dreams, extreme depression, sleeplessness, loss of memory, sudden bouts of aggression, an inability to form relationships and a lack of trust in others, even loved ones. Everyone can experience these problems from time to time, but when they last more than a month and someone has been involved in a shooting war, raped, escaped a flood or lost their home, it’s a safe bet that they have PTSD.  

Experts like to estimate the percentage of people who have had a specific trauma who end up suffering from PTSD, e.g. only (only!) 30% of Vietnam War veterans will display PSTD symptoms during their lives. Overall, the medical community believes that about 10% of the population will have PSTD, with the occurrence more common in women. I think all the official percentages of those experiencing traumatic conditions who end up with PSTD are low. Lots of people just suffer in silence, or they present symptoms that are poorly understood, e.g., the horde of men who came home from World War II and turned into distant, unemotional fathers and focused their waking hours solely on their careers and/or hid their fears and anxieties inside a bottle. As significant as underreporting is under-diagnosis: society has a vested interest in minimizing the psychic damage to those who fight wars; women who suffer sexual abuse; and the poor, usually minorities, who face food insecurity or have been moved out of their neighborhoods by urban planning or gentrification.

Whatever the unalloyed numbers are, only a fool or an ideologue would deny that a large percentage of the children torn from their families at border crossings will be scarred for life, unhappy, unable to achieve their potential, prone to depression or substance abuse, perhaps always feeling like a lonely outsider. These are human tragedies that didn’t have to occur.

But wait, the cynic among us, will say. These children were refugees from natural disasters or violence, so they already have undergone much trauma. These self-serving apologists seem to forget the special bond between children and their parents. Before the teen years, children’s lives revolve around their parents, who protect them, shelter them, feed them, love them, teach them basic values and provide them with models of human behavior. There’s a lot that parents do to protect children from trauma. They can do without so their children get what they need. They can turn a flight from terror into an adventure. They can articulate a rosy vision of the wonderful future in their new home. They can hug them and tell them they love them and that everything is going to turn out fine.

War, famine, terror, flooding, food insecurity, a sudden plunge into poverty—all children or young adults will handle any trauma better when part of a loving (or even not so loving) family when they face these evils.

But to do it without a parent? To be alone in a large cage inside a windowless building, being herded around by ominous-looking strangers, not knowing if and when you’ll ever see your family—the center of your life—again, not knowing where they are? Why were you torn away from them? When will you see them again? Why won’t they come get you? Don’t they love you anymore?

No matter how horrible a child’s life has been, it gets worse when it is taken from its family. Always.

The Trump Administration has tried an odious argument in favor of parent-child separations, stating that in many cases, the adults aren’t really the parents, but drug dealers who bought, borrowed or stole the children to make it easier to get through border control. Oh, sure there are. Just as there really was at least one woman on welfare who drove a late-model, fully-loaded Cadillac in the late 1970s. And I’m sure that Willie Horton really did commit a violent crime while on parole. But like Reagan’s welfare queen and Bush I’s paroled violent offender, the child who is part of an elaborate ploy to gain illegal admittance to the United States is a statistical anomaly. Studies show that there has never been very much welfare fraud and that most cons on parole say clean. And I’m quite certain that virtually all children who arrive at the border with adults are coming with their parents or another close family member, and not a drug dealer.

Reagan, Bush I and Trump all argued from anecdote and not from fact. The fact is that the United States started doing the “extreme vetting” Trump called for during the 2016 presidential campaign long before Trump demanded that we build a wall along the Mexican border. The proof of it is in the fact that immigrants—legal and otherwise—commit far fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans. Under Clinton, Bush II and Obama, we developed a state apparatus which is quite good at keeping out bad actors. Breaking up families has not helped fight drug smuggling. It has done nothing but increase misery and assure that perhaps thousands of children will have emotional problems later in life. There was never any reason to automatically separate children from their parents at border control points.

Except of course, to assuage the base urge to be cruel to the downtrodden.

The cruelty of creating thousands of future PTSD sufferers is part of the greater cruelty of turning away refugees at the border. It reminds me of the cruelty with which southern sheriffs enforced Jim Crow laws or attacked Civil Rights protesters. It reminds me of the cruelty with which German soldiers treated Jews, white masters treated African-American slaves, and conquerors have treated the conquered throughout the ages. It’s as if the perpetrator of pain took—and takes—a special sadistic pleasure in hurting others.

In all cases, the underlying reason for the cruelty may have been humanity’s essential bloodthirstiness, but the excuse was that these were lesser people or not people at all—animals as Trump sometimes calls non-European immigrants.

But human beings are not animals. Those who think that some people are animals or no better than animals or want to treat them as animals are despicable human beings. The real deplorables, to take a phrase from the winner of the 2016 presidential popular vote.  

American policy at home and abroad should not be to create more victims of PSTD, but to reduce the circumstances that lead to this psychic ailment.