By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

When you ponder all the infectious diseases that have been eliminated from Planet Earth over the years, you might then grasp the utterly absurdity of the criticism that is being leveled at the COVID-19 vaccine that is slowly doing the same thing to the current pandemic.

Polio has been eradicated. Smallpox, too. Same for tuberculosis. Measles and chicken pox are still around, but children get vaccinated against them anyway.

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook that wondered whether the right-wing media outlets had been around when the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines were being distributed and whether they would be critical of those research efforts, too.

Of course they would!

We have entered some sort of political twilight zone. A U.S. president bungled the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it gripped the nation and the world. Instead of taking ownership of his mistakes and his failure, he initiates a campaign that denigrates the vaccine and those who promote it.

It has snowballed ever since, becoming a monstrous liability in the effort to get all Americans vaccinated against the killer disease and the variants it has spawned.

Good grief, man! The historical evidence is all around us that well-researched, heavily tested and certified vaccines do the job they are intended to do. Those who refuse to protect themselves and their children put not only themselves at risk, they pose an existential threat to us all.

They should be deemed a menace to society.