A dunk tank to drown the most vulnerable members of society
Starting the Critical Objects class, I grouped with Cara Neel and Veronica Alfaro to tackle a subject that’s unnecessarily controversial: vaccine.
Background
Vaccines have been researched and proven highly effective in preventing illness. Major medical organizations state vaccines are very safe.
These organizations include: CDC, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Institute of Medicine (IOM), American Medical Association (AMA), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), UNICEF, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), World Health Organization (WHO), Public Health Agency of Canada, Canadian Paediatric Society, National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). [49][50][43][51][52][54][55][56][57][58]
“Vaccines are some of the safest medical products available.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services states
The research linking between vaccine and autism was debunked long ago. Read more about it on the Vaccine Knowledge Project, an independent source ran by academic research group in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oxford. Cross-reference with other legitimate medical sources.
“It’s more risky for your child to not be vaccinated”
Carrie Nelson, MD, chair of the Commission on Health of the Public and Science for the American Academy of Family Physicians
Regardless of all the official medical knowledge on the matter, widespread misinformation is leading masses to electively opt out of the vaccine. As a result, an outbreak of a measles is rapidly spreading across the States. The Washington State Department of Health website has confirmed 48 cases of the measles as of February 3 2019, with numbers rising daily.
The point we wanted to focus on, is that the risk in opting out is posed not to the healthy, unvaccinated child. It’s posed to the most vulnerable members of society, such as children who are too young to be vaccinated and people with compromised immune systems who cannot receive vaccines, like people who have received chemotherapy.
Anti-Vaxx to Dunk in the Tank
This manually built, arduino-coded model of a dunk tank is a silly little death trap designed to illustrate the risk of opting out on vaccine. Each button push represents an individual who choses to opt out. Every unvaccinated person leads to drop in herd immunity which puts the entire community and especially the most vulnerable members at risk for contracting the disease. This can lead to serious illness and death for these individuals.