Maurice Who?

Yesterday a great man died at the age of 85. His name was Maurice Hilleman, though I doubt you've heard of him. He just happened to be the man who developed vaccines for the mumps, the measles, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis and other diseases that saved literally tens of millions of lives worldwide.

Yet everyone in North America knows the name Terri Schiavo.

Regardless of which side of the Schiavo case you were on, I think it's ridiculous to use a human being to set a precedent for anything. If laws had been carefully crafted, laid out, and followed in this case, a woman's suffering could've been diminished (though there is some debate about whether or not she could actually feel pain). Instead her family and friends had to go through several emotional removal/replacements of her feeding tube over the past few years. Meanwhile the politicians sat around with their thumbs up their asses and passed the buck to the next court, the next appeal, or the next judge.

And John and Jane Q-viewer (to quote Chris Farley) sat glued to the televison. Debates were heated, people rallied and tried to yell louder than their opponents, and all the while a woman lay dying in a hospital bed.

In my opinion that's bullshit, but what's even worse is the fact that a delicate family issue regarding a single person became every news agency's top story. In a just world the family would've settled things quietly and alone, and the media would focus on something more important. Oh, I dunno, say the Darfur genocide or some little thing like that.

I bet I heard the name Schiavo more times than I could've counted the day after her death. In reality she was just a brain-dead woman who contributed exponentially less to the world than did Hilleman. Yet today I only heard his name once on TV, which happened to be on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.

On the plus side, I didn't hear his name once (or see any dramatic hospital-bed-footage of the man) in the days before his death.

Maurice Hilleman: 1919-2005