As in all things, the best way to speak to antivaxxers is
respectfully and in detail, taking time to listen to the concerns of each of
the various schools of thought that reside under the antivaxxing umbrella and
to address each of these specific concerns individually. The only way to have a
substantive discussion and to perform that rarest of all miracles, changing
someone’s mind, is to talk to
antivaxxers, not at them, and to
demonstrate as best we can why we are so committed to the notion that their
objection to vaccination does not outweigh the benefits to society or to them
personally when mass vaccination becomes the societal norm.
It is sometimes exasperating for people frustrated with
antivaxxers’ intransigence on this issue to talk to them, precisely because so
much is at stake, so the name-calling begins pretty quickly. The issue is too
big and too important and we must come to better unity on this because disease
prevention is one of the great achievements of science and medicine, and as a
species we ought to leverage it to our greatest benefit. The science is too
good, too consistent and too well supported by decades of real world testing to
resort to a hostility that is going to add an even greater defensive posture to
persons resistant to vaccinating their children.
Nobody wants harm to come to their children, and if it
indeed exists at all, there is an infinitesimally small percentage of parents
for whom society’s greater good does not figure at least somewhat into their thinking and their
decision-making. These objections to vaccination then are born of love, not
malice, and that is the spirit in which our discussion should be held. The
antivaxxer community wants a healthy life for their children as much as that
vast majority of people who are vaccinating their children do. They are
concerned about the rise in autism and other early onset childhood diseases,
and their ascription by at least one published study and by religious and
thought leaders within other disciplines to vaccination as a source of these conditions is what is
driving some of their objections.
The first piece in attempting to dismantle this way of
looking at vaccination is to inform people that the one study that linked the
measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism has been debunked and proven
false on numerous technical fronts. It is utterly discredited and is not taken
seriously by any major research hospital in the world, nor has another come to
supplant it with similar results and better credibility. Its author has been
linked to a conflict of interest scandal and early proponents of the study have
since disavowed it.
The 1998 study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield was published in the
British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and suggested that the measles, mumps and
rubella (MMR) vaccine may cause autism. By 2001, the study was being decimated
by the medical community and has undergone more than 100 peer reviews since
then with complete disavowal of the study’s findings. Nonetheless, the damage was
done, and the residual effects of the Wakefield farce are still being felt
today. If an unawareness of the rebuke
of that one junk article is still standing between someone and their decision
to vaccinate, then it is incumbent on media outlets to be transparent about the
Wakefield study’s bogus nature.
Another part of the problem stems from ethnocentricity. We
have a lack of awareness of the dramatic benefit vaccination programs provide.
Worldwide, when a disease becomes eradicated in a particular geographic area,
the population very quickly grasps the true miracle of preventative medicine.
Of all of the aid assistance the United States provides other nations of the
world, there is none more gratefully received than vaccination efforts. But not
only are we ethnocentric, we are also what you might call chronocentric, that
is to say, unaware of any time apart from our own.
Society’s temporal distance from times when communicable
diseases were scourges of the United States is at the heart of this new rise in
unvaccinated children.
The first of a series of waves of polio gripped the United States in
the late 1800s. By the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the epidemic
was cresting, polio crippled an average of more than 35,000 people in the
United States each year; parents across the United States would swoon with each
summer cold their child would contract, with each allergic reaction to the
spring bloom, dreading the worst, dreading polio.
Death, paralysis, iron lungs and wheelchairs were the fates
of many. The lucky ones got crutches. In a plea that boosted the research
community in much the same way Kennedy’s words hurried space exploration, FDR
begged the scientific community in 1944 to throw its vast imagination and deep
body of knowledge toward the eradication of the scourge that put him in a
wheelchair: “The dread disease that we battle at home, like the enemy we oppose
abroad, shows no concern, no pity for the young. It strikes—with its most frequent
and devastating force—against children. And that is why much of the future
strength of America depends upon the success that we achieve in combating this
disease.”
If you want to hear a song that captures with the typical
stoicism of the greatest generation the experience of living with polio, listen
to the lyrics of Save the Last Dance For
Me in the knowledge that its author, Doc Pomus, had been felled by polio
and wrote the lyrics watching his wife dance with others on their wedding night
from his wheelchair. I work with a man whose father was a farmer and one of polio’s
victims. He sometimes tells stories about his father, and occasionally a
recollection of him swinging an uncooperative leg through a chicken coop door
or some such detail will find its way into the story, and the wince that comes
to this man’s face in those tellings is moving indeed.
In the United States, we are polio-free, and we are polio
free thanks to Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine, which was aggressively
promoted beginning in the 1950s. Because of the social contract most Americans
seemed to agree to, the United States quickly reached the “herd immunity”
threshold. Herd immunity is a critical point past which a disease circulating through a society experiences
a diminishment in instances of contraction because of so many potential hosts
being immune. That diminishment spirals further down more quickly the larger
the percentage of the population that is vaccinated until, if a sufficient
percentage of the population is vaccinated, the pathogen cannot reproduce and
effectively dies. Most young parents do not have a direct connection to polio,
there having been an entire generation inserted into the history, and this social contract is not being adhered to at the level it once was.
The recent uptick in instances of measles is largely
attributed to children whose parents have elected not to vaccinate them. For
these parents, their error is plain, and hopefully they understand that now. In
that there are certain percentages of the population who cannot be vaccinated
including infants, pregnant women and some other categories, these populations
are put at risk through no oversight or fault of their own. For this reason, I
believe that refusing to immunize one’s child is an immoral act that is,
perhaps saddest of all, born of good intentions that are driven by bad information.
Roald Dahl’s letter imploring the world to vaccinate following the death of his
daughter to measles is essential reading for anyone still resistant to
vaccinating his or her children. Absent a preponderance of the population
participating in vaccination, these diseases will come roaring back.
There is a percentage of antivaxxers who come to their
decisions from a mistrust of government, both from a left perspective
politically and a right perspective. Antivaxxers who come at it from a left
perspective and additionally chastise Republican politicians for ignoring
climate science are displaying egregious intellectual inconsistency. Those
people need to reconcile those two issues to themselves because they are fruit
from the same tree and their simultaneous endorsement reveals a lack of
seriousness with regard to a serious issue. That disposition is truly a shame
and there’s not much more to be said about that.
Government conspiracy theorists who believe mass vaccinations
to be susceptible to governmental incursion for microchipping, for hotshot
vaccines that make the population more docile and other such outside
suggestions, I just have to say that whatever you imagine the government to be
doing, they are doing worse, but they are not f***ing with your vaccines. They
have bigger fish to fry and better pans to do it with. Antivaxxers from the
right and left who additionally allege money collusion have to understand that
big pharma and big medicine in general make a lot more treating disease than they do vaccinating against it.
Vaccines have staved off invasive and sometimes fatal
illnesses in America for generations, and it is to our shame to allow our lack of continued vigilance in this area make this current era in
United States history one that allows these devastating childhood diseases to
come back with their former vigor. We have the technology; let’s use it. It is
incumbent upon all of us to do our share and to reach and sustain herd
immunity. Say it with me now, “Moo!”
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