The vaccine debate is one of our generation’s most frustrating undying topics. There’s no link between vaccines and autism — something that’s been proven over and over again — but that hasn’t cooled the hot topic one iota, it seems. When barely qualified people like politicians add their voices to the fracas, it certainly doesn’t help.
Hearing a voice of reason enter the conversation is always a breath of fresh air, but there’s something especially appealing about the rapid-fire opinion of a new “researcher” on the scene. We’re talking, of course, about 12-year-old Marco Arturo, a precocious little dude from Mexico whose video on the vaccine-autism link is puh-riceless.
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In it, Marco, gravely speaking a mile a minute, has something particularly shocking to share with the rest of the world — the evidence he’s uncovered and compiled about how vaccines cause autism. He’s gathered it all into a folder that’s marked “Evidence that vaccines cause autism” in a child’s scrawl, but there’s only one problem: The pages inside are blank.
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There’s no link, so of course the pages that have evidence of one on them would be blank. Well, all except for that last one, of course.
The appeal of the video is easy enough to grasp. Marco doesn’t sound like a kid parroting back what he thinks we want to hear. He seems like a smart, precocious kid who’s come to the conclusion independently, and he asserts all of it with the kind of confidence only a preteen who’s got it all figured out can muster.
When he says the reason those pages are as unmarked as the pure, driven snow is “because there is no evidence to support the statement that vaccines are linked to autism in any way whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s almost an accident that vaccines are preventing millions of children from dying from diseases like polio and measles and meningitis and hepatitis…” he doesn’t just sound passionate about getting the truth out — he sounds like a scary-smart kid with a crazy-bright future ahead of him.
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Ultimately, though, the reason people are hitting share over and over on this one — it’s been shared more than 80,000 times and viewed more than 6 million — is for what it represents to a lot of people who are frustrated with the irrational and dangerous fear of vaccinations. Namely, the fact that if a child can understand the simple and empirical fact that there is no link between vaccines and autism, why can’t everyone?
More than that, though, is that if we can’t get through to this generation, maybe we can make a dent in the next. And when kids like Marco are ready to be parents a million years from now — presumably he’ll also be responsible for stuff like hover cars and being the president of Mars — they’ll take Marco’s advice: “Please, vaccinate your children.”
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