Conflating Green And Anti-Vaccine

Today we took the lad to Descanso Gardens, a lovely little place nearby where we walked around and looked at all kinds of plants and rode an adorable little train.  Fun stuff.

Anytime we go to a museum or botanical garden we have to hit the gift shop.  So while looking around at all the pretty cards, fun toys, candles, and other cute stuff, I found this book, Green Baby. As a person who’s always interested in reading about sustainability, I started flipping the pages, and when I got to the chapter on vaccinations, I was a bit stunned.

I mean, why are vaccinations even in a book about green living?

The chapter contained all the usual vaccine woo, but couched in careful language so as not to seem too alarmist.  The book recommends that readers ask questions about the toxic ingredients in vaccines, like mercury and formaldehyde.  And also that they find out just why some parents skip certain vaccinations or space them out according to an alternate schedule.  Basically, these are all the questions that have been answered hundreds or thousands of times and really shouldn’t even be taken seriously at this point.  The language was careful not to come out against vaccines, but it cautioned readers to just do their research.  So it plants the seeds in the readers’ minds that vaccinations contain ingredients that are unhealthy and anti-green.

But the thing is, vaccines are not a green  issue.  I could see if the manufacture of vaccines were somehow clogging up waterways or filling landfills that there might be information in a book on sustainability about that.  But that is not the case.  This book is not so much about straight up environmentalism and sustainable living but about this vague idea of “green” that somehow encompasses a carefully worded anti-vaccine rhetoric.

I am sure there is other information in this book that is not well researched or not up to date. I didn’t buy it, so I can’t give a full review, but there was a lot of “organic” information as well.  If anyone saw a recent episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit, then you are learning, as am I, that organic farming really isn’t as sustainable as conventional farming and that it doesn’t even support the small farmer as it claims to do.  (And it’s not just Bullshit–although that’s the most entertaining way to learn about the organic myth–you can find lots of information online as well.)  But I can excuse an environmental baby book for still touting organic as a great idea.  Organic and green just seem to go hand in hand.  And the information about organic products has become so entrenched and so enmeshed with the idea of sustainability.

But vaccines and green?  Those two don’t even belong together.  I have only heard the two words together from the likes of Jenny McCarthy.  Vaccination just isn’t an environmental issue, period, and I found it alarming that it has been absorbed into a book about green living for parents.  The misinformation about vaccines is like a stain that just won’t come out and seems to have gotten into every nook and cranny of the American public consciousness.

Let’s hope if this book sticks around that future editions correct the egregious inclusion of vaccinations as a subject that has anything to do with environmentalism, unless it is to debunk myths about supposed toxins in vaccines.