Apodaca: When expert advice is ignored

It’s considered bad manners, not to mention annoyingly smug, when people say, “I told you so.”

But sometimes it’s hard to resist pointing out what many of us — most of us, I think — have been warning about the likelihood of adverse consequences brought about by certain ill-advised decisions. And now we are seeing those consequences materialize, just as we feared.

We are witnessing, for instance, the result of declining measles vaccination rates playing out exactly as predicted by public health experts, immunologists, epidemiologists, and those of us with enough common sense to know that social media and conspiratorial online chat rooms are not good sources of medical guidance.

The measles virus is one of the most contagious known viruses, very easily passed from person to person just by breathing in the same general airspace or touching contaminated surfaces. An infection is particularly dangerous to people with compromised immune systems and to infants and young children who have not been fully immunized; it can lead to serious long-term health issues and in a few cases, to death.

For decades we have had a vaccine that has proved to be highly effective at preventing measles infections, and which essentially wiped out the disease in the U.S. — that is, until widespread misinformation about its safety led to a growing number of parents deciding to forgo or delay vaccinating their children.

Now we have measles outbreaks surfacing in communities throughout the nation, including here in Orange County, where a couple of cases have recently been reported. Los Angeles County health officials on May 16 reported a fifth case of the disease. So far this year, 48 measles cases have been identified in California, nearly double the 25 cases recorded for all of last year. Nationwide, three people have died this year due to measles infections. All three were unvaccinated.

Another tragic but foreseeable outcome centers around the proliferation of kids who are allowed to operate electric motorcycles and e-bikes that are capable of traveling at speeds that most of us would agree are far too fast for young riders to handle safely.

Every day for the past few years, we have heard warnings from throughout our communities that this dangerous mix was bound to lead to bad things happening. Sure enough, bad things have happened.

Earlier this month, a 13-year-old boy died in Garden Grove after crashing his e-motorcycle into a center median. In April, a 14-year-old boy riding an e-motorcycle fatally hit an 81-year-old man in Lake Forest. The boy’s mother faces charges of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly allowing her son to drive the vehicle despite previous warnings.

Injuries related to these types of vehicles are soaring. As previously reported, Rady Children’s Health Orange County, formerly CHOC, stated that it had seen 201 e-bike-related trauma cases last year, compared with just one case as recently as 2021. Such injuries are now the top reason for its emergency room trauma visits, officials reported.

Obviously, the warnings weren’t enough. So now some public officials are mounting a more vigorous effort to try to rein in the problem.

For instance, the surge in incidents recently led Newport-Mesa Unified School District to adopt a stricter e-bike policy. And California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, along with several district attorneys, last month issued a consumer alert stating that two-wheeled vehicles that can go faster than 28 miles per hour are mopeds or motorcycles, not e-bikes, as these vehicles are sometimes marketed.

Shortly after the alert, Amazon announced that it would stop selling certain high-speed e-bikes in the state.

Also this month, the Orange County district attorney’s office announced the creation of a unit targeting illegal e-bike and e-motorcycle use.

Many people also predicted that a series of costly decisions by the Huntington Beach City Council to expend city resources suing the state repeatedly over issues such as California’s housing mandate, voter ID laws, and immigration would end in failure.

The lawsuits claim that Huntington Beach is a charter city, and therefore can call its own shots on these matters. But so far, the city has mostly been on the losing end of these legal battles, with judges telling it to abide by state law.

The council’s extended fight to exert control over the Huntington Beach library system’s book selection process provides us with another cautionary tale. As previously reported in the Daily Pilot, an Orange County Superior Court judge recently ordered the city to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees after it was sued by a group of plaintiffs who argued that the restrictive book policies violated state law.

So, yes, it would be tempting to say, “We told you so. We told you to follow the well-established medical consensus on vaccines, to not let kids operate fast-moving vehicles, and to stop spending taxpayer money on pointless, ideologically-driven legal battles.”

But we can’t change what has already come to pass. Our focus should be trained on the here and now, and on ways to encourage more enlightened, rationale behavior going forward. Then maybe a few more people will think twice when others are warning them about reckless behavior.