CARLTON FLETCHER: Suffer the little children of the lunatic fringe

Lunatic fringe I know you’re out there. You’re in hiding, And you hold your meetings.

— Red Rider

I keep telling myself, “Consider the source” when I hear these comments. But it’s just so danged hard.

A group was bloviating over the news of a scary polio outbreak in a couple of New York counties recently, and there was genuine concern in their conversation. Polio is, after all, a disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared America completely free of in 1994. This after the last community transmission of the disease came 15 years earlier, in 1979.

The comment that stuck in my craw?

“Yeah, we’re getting all these diseases now. Polio is back, and the last time we had polio in this country was almost 30 years ago. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s Biden and the Democrats letting all those illegal aliens cross our southern border. All those illegal people are the ones bringing their diseases here.”

Um, no.

This is what health officials say: A person came to New York State infected with a strain of polio that has been connected to samples found in the wastewater of Israel and the UK. The person didn’t realize they had polio, as there were no symptoms or they were mild. Then, because vaccination levels are low in some communities in New York state, the virus started spreading, eventually causing paralysis in a person in Rockland, N.Y. The virus then continued to fan out, since Rockland and Orange counties have some of the lowest polio vaccination rates for young kids in the country.

Of course, to the growing legion of conspiracy theorists out there, the translation of the preceding paragraph is: “The gov’ment done unleashed some polio on these good people because these people were too smart to make their children get these vaccinations that cause autism and all other kinds of maladies.”

And there lies your problem.

No, those hordes of illegal aliens sneaking across our border under the lackadaisical eye of the Biden administration did not bring polio with them. It was, medical experts are saying, brought from someone who had traveled to Israel or England. But it found enthusiastic hosts in areas where parents had refused to vaccinate their children. Unlike the COVID vaccine, which was mandatory, polio and other typically childhood disease vaccines are required for children to enter a school system in the nation.

But there’s a caveat … there’s always a caveat.

Parents can now legally refuse to have their children vaccinated based on their “religious beliefs.” These religious beliefs range from “vaccines are tools of the devil” to “vaccines are a form of government control” to “vaccines are used to purposely thin out the population.” The religion that these beliefs are based upon? It’s called conspiracy theorianity.

In some of the New York counties where polio was spreading, the vaccination rate is as low as 37%.

Health care officials who are looking into the New York outbreaks warn that more such outbreaks could follow and rapidly spread among populations where there are low levels of vaccination. Fanatics, though, care more about adhering to the myriad conspiracy theories that abound among mostly the outer edges of the right and the left — the lunatic fringe, as it were, of both parties — than they do the health of their children.

And allowing children to be sacrificed for a belief system that these kooks adhere to is about as close to the term lunatic fringe as one could get. They’ve been convinced by fellow loonies that that deceptive government is the evil of all right-thinking people, and they’re allowing their kids to pay the price. Sadly, because we have a bunch of Supreme Court justices who land just this side of these same conspiracy theorists, it’s not likely the health of other children whose parents are not under some delusional fantasy world in which evil awaits any who do not follow will be protected.

Some of these slogan-spouting oddballs are quick to rally their fellow believers with tropes like “Live free or die.” And that’s great … for you. But “Live free or my kids will die” doesn’t really cut it as something I’d want to rally around.