“The Mirror Crack’d” was based on a true story. In 1943, Gene Tierney volunteered to help out at the Hollywood Canteen, a support-the-troops nightclub set up by people in the film industry. (This was after she made “Heaven Can Wait” and just before “Laura.”) Tierney, who was pregnant (the father was Oleg Cassini), came away infected with rubella. Her daughter, Daria, was born early and in bad shape—just over three pounds, deaf, with severe cataracts and brain damage. She never learned to speak. Sometime afterward, Tierney met a woman who said that she’d gone to the Hollywood Canteen that night despite being in quarantine with rubella. From Tierney’s website:
“Everyone told me I shouldn’t go,” the starstruck woman told Tierney years later at a tennis match, not realizing what she was responsible for, “but I just had to go. You were my favorite.”
Tierney didn’t kill her, but she did descend into years of depression. Daria was eventually institutionalized. (Howard Hughes paid many of her medical bills.)
This is from a New Yorker article about the incalculable damage Andrew Wakefield, ex MD has done since the late 1990s. This is why vaccination is not a personal choice; it's a public health issue. Because this is the kind of damage non-vaccinated people can do when they get infected.
__________________
Gentlemen! We're burning daylight! Riders up! -Bill Murray
|