Shot at what?
Not some half-time free-throw contest during tonight’s college basketball championship. I’m talking an even more life-altering challenge. Shot@Life is a chance to literally give life to a child, many children. I haven’t fallen and sustained a head trauma, occasionally I find it humanizing to suck it up and support a cause other than media-bashing (officially, accuracy in the media).
So this whole month I’ll be telling you why I’m a big fan of the United Nation Foundation and their Shot@Life campaign, an international effort to invest in a healthier world by immunizing children in developing countries from preventable childhood diseases. Officially the campaign will launch in Atlanta on April 26th.
Now I’m not suppose to hit you with really big numbers because they supposedly turn people off and as we know here, they’re so often given without context. So I’m not suppose to just say that 2 million kids around the world die each year from diseases we can prevent. Nor am I suppose to talk just stats and figures without personal stories. Like just telling you 1 in 5 kids in the developing world don’t have access to vaccines. Or that for five dollars you can give a kid from childhood disease. For twenty, you can protect a kid from 4 preventable diseases – measles, polio, diarrhea and pneumonia.
You know I think too many messages have become unmoored from evidence. At the risk of leaving the safety of stat speak, I will say I feel some responsibility to address distorted perceptions of vaccine safety, misinformation we can pin on the now defrocked autism quack Andrew Wakefield not to mention the media that failed to call out his specious theories and fraudulent data.
Anyhow, I will be posting regular updates and factoids for the next month in honor of the April 26th launch.
You can join the campaign at http://shotatlife.org/
Or join them on Twitter @ShotAtLife