Sounding off: Risk of not vaccinating

Regarding Susan Gero’s letter “Vaccine curiosity”: Common sense is that you can Google the reasons vaccinated people are at risk and how dangerous this disease is. It’s not big pharma! In 2017 worldwide, 110,000 people died of measles. It is deadly.

People with compromised immune systems — people with HIV, cancer fighters , people on immune suppressant drugs for chronic disease, etc. — are at risk (even if they’re vaccinated). Infants who aren’t old enough to be vaccinated and the elderly are at risk as well; as you age, your immune system is not able to defend you as well. I get both pneumonia vaccines, but still got pneumonia.

You are not informed or are looking for conspiracies. When an unvaccinated person is in a public place, others are put at risk. When unvaccinated people get on a plane to vacation in other countries, they are putting masses of people at risk. That may be your right, but it’s not very civilized or thoughtful.

Dorothy F. Otto, Hempfield

People want school choice, not discussion

In response to recently passed legislation increasing caps for tax credit scholarships, the Tribune-Review hopes we can bog the scholarships down in endless discussion (“School choice should be discussed, not automatic.” More discussion sounds great — unless you’re one of the tens of thousands of families denied scholarships every year. Despite the clear need, there is currently no process to ensure scholarships increase with demand.

Every time we debate this issue, one fact looms large: We need more scholarships, because each application represents a student in need. But political considerations stop some lawmakers from supporting increases.

Families are looking for options, whether to rescue a child from a dangerous school or find a curriculum that fits their learning style. While there are plenty of good district schools, many parents would rather send their children to charter or private schools.

What the Tribune-Review advocates is what we have done for the past 18 years: debate. Meanwhile, over half of scholarship applicants are trapped in failing district schools, watching their best learning years melt away.

The “discussion” is over, and the verdict is in. People want choice. Not only for today, but for generations to come.

Janson Prieb, Harrisburg

The writer is an intern with the Commonwealth Foundation.

Misinformed on Obama vs. Trump

It’s hard to know where to begin with Ron Raymond’s letter “Obama vs. Trump.” Like so many other right-wing parrots, he directs us to see the effects of socialism in Venezuela. Funny, I never hear these people speak of Norway, Canada or Finland, to name a few.

The only reason Barack Obama may be seen as an “ineffective president” is that the Republicans have sabotaged his work at every turn. Obama’s accomplishments were considerable, and included the Iran agreement, which was working.

Raymond says Trump has given us security, but now we have threat of war with Iran. Kim Jong Un, his buddy, is building more bombs.

But let’s talk about climate change, arguably the biggest security threat we have. Trump pulled us out of the Paris accords and has overturned, or is in the process of overturning, 78 environmental laws and counting. Climate change is not a hoax. The military and all but a handful of scientists, most paid by energy companies, agree that this is an existential threat to our planet. Do you want to get your science from scientists or the partisan talking heads on Fox News?

It is clear to any thinking person that if you support Trump, you must be either very misinformed or very rich. Which are you, Mr. Raymond? Do you have children who will have to live in the world you will be leaving them? I hope people will wake up before it is too late. The Grand Old Party is not what it used to be.

Al Duerig, Salem

Women’s health choices should be their own

Robin Hammonds should be commended for her insightful letter “With abortion outlawed, who will take care of the babies?” She wrote, “No one religious group has the right to impose its religious beliefs on others.” This is manifestly true.

Back in the day, I attended the wedding of one of the loveliest young women I’ve ever known. A few months later, she died from an ectopic pregnancy because her religion left her no other option. What was pro-life about that?

It galls me that evangelical groups seem to have skipped over the admonition from the Bible to “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Now we have conservative legislatures in red states, composed primarily of uptight white men, trying to force women to carry pregnancies to term even if they are the victims of rape or underage incest. These people should be ashamed.

Men, unless they are medical professionals, should have no voice in a woman’s personal health choices. They certainly shouldn’t be making them a crime. That is one of the most bigoted things I’ve ever heard of.

Males, who have equal responsibility for making babies, shouldn’t inflict their questionable morals upon a different, nobler sex — or anyone else, for that matter — especially in a free society.

Jim Harger, New Kensington

Democrats and secrecy

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. … Our way of life is under attack.”

John F. Kennedy knew the extreme dangers of government agencies like the CIA and FBI abusing their powers or being corrupted. He tried to warn us, we didn’t listen and less than two years later, he was murdered and nobody said anything like that ever again.

Currently, we have Democrats protecting that same secrecy. Out of one side of their mouths they say “declassify the entire Mueller report” and out of the other side they say “you can’t declassify the documents pertaining to how the investigation was conducted.” Documents that would show what intelligence began the investigation, which American citizens were surveilled, and how it came to be that a sitting Democratic president allowed anything remotely resembling spying on a then-Republican candidate for president?

But it wasn’t just spying. Did a sitting president weaponize the Justice Department and the American intelligence agencies against his political enemies? That question deserves an answer, and in JFK’s free and open society, we would get it.

It should be the biggest story in history, but for some reason the mainstream media doesn’t care to investigate. Quite the contrary, they’re fighting alongside the Democrats to keep these documents classified. Which is a new low even for them.

Branden Lowanse, West Newton

Buttigieg and Jefferson

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg recently declared that removing Thomas Jefferson’s name from events such as the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners was “the right thing to do.” Before Buttigieg carries his cleansing campaign into public buildings or anywhere else named in Jefferson’s honor, I have a few questions.

If Jefferson’s principal legacy is that of a slaveholder, then why did leading officials in the Confederate government dissociate themselves from him? Jefferson’s egalitarian and libertarian ideas, according to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, “were fundamentally wrong,” for “(t)hey rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” whereas the Confederate government was “founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Would the Democratic Party align itself with a Confederacy founded on slavery? The logic of the American left’s current trajectory suggests that perhaps it would. After all, “slavery,” in the words of antebellum southern intellectual George Fitzhugh, “is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.”

Should they set about cleansing every edifice from which Jefferson’s name now offends them, Buttigieg and other Democrats will confirm that in fact they have rejected Jefferson’s ideas and legacy, in which case they will join a list that includes not only pro-slavery apologists but monarchists, aristocrats, fascists, communists and every form of tyrant that has plagued the earth since 1776.

Michael Schwarz, Monroeville

Taxpayers can’t afford government’s raises

Once again the taxpayers of Pennsylvania have been played for suckers by our government. Why is there no rebellion when our governor feels it’s OK to give his cronies thousands of dollars in raises paid for by the taxpayers, and where does the line start to collect some of this cash (“Gov. Tom Wolf started 2nd term with hefty raises to senior aides”)?

These are the same people who can’t even balance a budget, yet they deserve a raise. Get real. I don’t think the people of the government realize they are pushing citizens to the limit, and it needs to come to a head soon.

I just hope the people who voted for Gov. Tom Wolf are happy. Maybe they will get a cut of one of these big raises. Yeah, right.

Dwayne Buffer, Youngwood