Walt Flinn: America has benefited from advances in health care

I find it odd that national healthcare advancements have become viewed as the very tip of socialism.

When I was a child, 88 years ago, I had diphtheria and my parents left the hospital with no hope. All these years later I can write about it and most of you have never heard of it. Eliminated by vaccination.

My wife's brother died of an infection in his foot at age 12 because penicillin wasn't a cure at that time.

My mother died of a cancerous brain tumor at 29 in 1937. A lack of experience led to a diagnosis of sleeping sickness and after nine months of pain, at death, brain tissue was sent to Boston from Chicago and the answer was cancer, the result of advancement in medial research.

In my youth, public swimming pools were closed because of polio. Dr. Jonas Salk refused any payment for his discovery of an effective vaccine because he had been funded by the March of Dimes in research. No one suggested anything but prayerful thanks.

Let me be plain, I think idiocy runs rampant when the solution to a possible death-causing disease is present, and we use voodoo logic of conspiracy to deny the facts of the success of vaccination in stopping the spread of COVID-19.

I think I will leave Earth just in time as more and more conspiracy and snake-oil salesmen are on the horizon. It would seem facts and logic are no match for fear.

Walt Flinn

Laconia