My Kids Got Shot

and I'm glad they did.    I didn't, because the measles vaccination didn't exist then.  I spent weeks in a darkened room and to this day I need tinted lenses to protect me from bright sunlight.  Yet there are gullible people still in this country who think that the vaccination will allow Martians to read their brainwaves or something.  

Here is Phil Plait's take on the latest information released by the Centers for Disease Control:

"The CDC just announced that measles cases in the United States in 2013 tripled over the annual average. There were 175 cases (so far), when usually there are about 60.

In her bid for attention, Jenny McCarthy tells

mothers not to vaccinate their children, while

she appears in cigarette ads.

Why?

Well, let’s see. In March, there were 58 cases alone in Brooklyn, N.Y., tied to a Jewish community that refused or delayed vaccinations. In Texas, a megachurch that preached anti-vaccination views had an outbreak with at least 20 cases. In North Carolina, 23 cases were reported in one outbreak; most of them in a religious (Hare Krishna) community that was largely unvaccinated."

See a connection?

And one in five children who contract that "harmless" child's disease are hospitalized. One in a thousand will get encephalitis. One or two out of a thousand will die from it.

Yes, die. From a disease that is essentially wholly preventable with a vaccine. Worldwide, measles kills well over a hundred thousand people every year. That’s 18 deaths per hour.

 And not one of those deaths should have occurred.