[PROVE] Respond to NYT: Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines

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From: PROVE [mailto:newsletter@...]

Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 1:55 PM

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Subject: [PROVE] Respond to NYT: Public Health

Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines

Dear Prove Members,

The New York Times has published an article

entitled “Public Health Risk Seen as Parents

Reject Vaccines” (posted below and online at

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21vaccine.html?hp>http://www.nytimes.com/2\

008/03/21/us/21vaccine.html?hp

) that deserves a strong response from our

members. Please read this article and send

letters to the editor and post comments on the

website letting the New York Times know what you

think. Please point out some of the numerous

mistakes and glaring bias. You may even want to

post your responses on the various blogs and

email lists you are on encouraging others to do the same.

In this article, the New York Times’ has

demonstrated callous disregard for the families

devastated by vaccine reactions, and their

willingness to act as accomplices to propagate

the ignorant and inhumane agenda of vaccine

zealots who REFUSE to acknowledge the countless

studies demonstrating vaccine risks is

unacceptable in this country. Employees at New

York Times not involved in the writing and

editing should be embarrassed and ashamed of

their colleagues for this article.

Intelligent and highly educated parents across

the country are questioning vaccines in

increasing numbers because they have observed for

themselves the FLAWS and the HOLES in the science

used to hold up unreasonable and sometimes

dangerous one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates and

they have seen for themselves previously healthy

children destroyed by vaccine reactions while top

public health officials categorically deny any

association. The public health infrastructure is

built on the flawed premise that parents who are

educated consumers and question vaccines are

somehow responsible for the failure of a drug to

perform as promised or advertised. Vaccines are

drugs that have the ability to cause injury and

death in some people period. NO amount of glorification will change that fact.

When you click on the link to the article

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21vaccine.html?hp>http://www.nytimes.com/2\

008/03/21/us/21vaccine.html?hp

you can post comments responding to the article

online. Additionally, information on sending

letters to the editor can be found at

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html

and letters can be sent to letters@....

Some of you may want to refer to their

self-proclaimed ethical policies namely in

section A1 - Our Duty to Our Audience, item

number 17 which states “As journalists we treat

our readers, viewers, listeners and online users

as fairly and openly as possible. Whatever the

medium, we tell our audiences the complete,

unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.” More

on their ethical policies can be found at

http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html#A1. The

media has an ethical obligation to tell people

the truth. Parents aren’t wrong to question

vaccines just because some people don’t like it.

Sincerely, Dawn

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21vaccine.html?hp

March 21, 2008

Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

SAN DIEGO ­ In a highly unusual outbreak of

measles here last month, 12 children fell ill;

nine of them had not been inoculated against the

virus because their parents objected, and the

other three were too young to receive vaccines.

The parents who objected to their children being

inoculated are among a small but growing number

of vaccine skeptics in California and other

states who take advantage of exemptions to laws

requiring vaccinations for school-age children.

The exemptions have been growing since the early

1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public

health officials and physicians find disturbing.

Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily

susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but

also present a danger to children who have had

their shots ­ the measles vaccine, for instance,

is only 95 percent effective ­ and to those

children too young to receive certain vaccines.

Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United

States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and

brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to

death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public

health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.

Every state allows medical exemptions, and most

permit exemptions based on religious practices.

But an increasing number of the vaccine skeptics

belong to a different group ­ those who object to

the inoculations because of their personal

beliefs, often related to an unproven notion that

vaccines are linked to autism and other disorders.

Twenty states, including California, Ohio and

Texas, allow some kind of personal exemption,

according to a tally by the s Hopkins University.

“I refuse to sacrifice my children for the

greater good,” said Sybil Carlson, whose

6-year-old son goes to school with several of the

children hit by the measles outbreak here. The

boy is immunized against some diseases but not

measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old

brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis.

“When I began to read about vaccines and how they

work,” she said, “I saw medical studies, not

given to use by the mainstream media, connecting

them with neurological disorders, asthma and immunology.”

Ms. Carlson said she understood what was at

stake. “I cannot deny that my child can put someone else at risk,” she said.

In 1991, less than 1 percent of children in the

states with personal-belief exemptions went

without vaccines based on the exemption; by 2004,

the most recent year for which data are

available, the percentage had increased to 2.54

percent, said Saad B. Omer, an assistant

scientist at the s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

While nationwide over 90 percent of children old

enough to receive vaccines get them, the number

of exemptions worries many health officials and

experts. They say that vaccines have saved

countless lives, and that personal-belief

exemptions are potentially dangerous and bad

public policy because they are not based on sound science.

“If you have clusters of exemptions, you increase

the risk of exposing everyone in the community,”

said Dr. Omer, who has extensively studied disease outbreaks and vaccines.

It is the absence, or close to it, of some

illnesses in the United States that keep some

parents from opting for the shots. Worldwide,

242,000 children a year die from measles, but it

used to be near one million. The deaths have

dropped because of vaccination, a 68 percent decrease from 2000 to 2006.

“The very success of immunizations has turned out

to be an Achilles’ heel,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a

pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at

Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Most of

these parents have never seen measles, and don’t

realize it could be a bad disease so they turn

their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not

perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

Dr. Sawyer and the vast majority of pediatricians

believe strongly that vaccinations are the

cornerstone of sound public health. Many doctors

view the so-called exempters as parasites, of a

sort, benefiting from the otherwise inoculated majority.

Most children get immunized to measles from a

combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, a live virus.

While the picture of an unvaccinated child was

once that of the offspring of poor and uneducated

parents, “exempters” are often well educated and

financially stable, and hold a host of like-minded child-rearing beliefs.

Vaccine skeptics provide differing explanations

for their belief that vaccines may cause various

illnesses and disorders, including autism.

Recent news that a federal vaccine court agreed

to pay the family of an autistic child in Georgia

who had an underlying mitochondrial disorder has

led some skeptics to speculate that vaccines may

worsen such conditions. Again, researchers say

there is no evidence to support this thesis.

andra , director of the Epidemiology

of U.S. Immunization Law project at

Washington University, said many of these parents

are influenced by misinformation obtained from

Web sites that oppose vaccination.

“The autism debate has convinced these parents to

refuse vaccines to the detriment of their own

children as well as the community,” Ms. said.

While many parents meet deep resistance and even

hostility from pediatricians when they choose to

delay, space or reject vaccines, they are often

able to find doctors who support their choice.

“I do think vaccines help with the public health

and helping prevent the occasional fatality,”

said Dr. Bob Sears, the son of the well-known

child-care author by the same name, who practices

pediatrics in San Clemente. Roughly 20 percent of

his patients do not vaccinate, Dr. Sears said,

and another 20 percent partially vaccinate.

“I don’t think it is such a critical public

health issue that we should force parents into

it,” Dr. Sears said. “I don’t lecture the parents

or try to change their mind; if they flat out

tell me they understand the risks I feel that I

should be very respectful of their decision.”

Some parents of unvaccinated children go to great

lengths to expose their children to childhood

diseases to help them build natural immunities.

In the wake of last month’s outbreak,

Palmer considered sending her son to a measles

party to contract the virus. Several years ago,

the boy, now 12, contracted chicken pox when Ms.

Palmer had him attend a gathering of children with that virus.

“It is a very common thing in the natural-health

oriented world,” Ms. Palmer said of the parties.

She ultimately decided against the measles party

for fear of having her son ostracized if he became ill.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, measles outbreaks in

Alaska and California triggered strong

enforcement of vaccine mandates by states, and exemption laws followed.

While the laws vary from state to state, most

allow children to attend school if their parents

agree to keep them home during any outbreak of

illnesses prevented by vaccines. The easier it is

to get an exemption ­ some states require barely

any paperwork ­ the more people opt for them,

according to Dr. Omer’s research, supported by other vaccine experts.

There are differences within states, too. There

tend to be geographic clusters of “exempters” in

certain counties or even neighborhoods or

schools. According to a 2006 article in The

Journal of The American Medical Association,

exemption rates of 15 percent to 18 percent have

been found in Ashland, Ore., and Vashon, Wash. In

California, where the statewide rate is about 1.5

percent, some counties were as high as 10 percent

to 19 percent of kindergartners.

In the San Diego measles outbreak, four of the

cases, including the first one, came from a

single charter school, and 17 children stayed

home during the outbreak to avoid contracting the illness.

There is substantial evidence that communities

with pools of unvaccinated clusters risk

infecting a broad community that includes people who have been inoculated.

For instance, in a 2006 mumps outbreak in Iowa

that infected 219 people, the majority of those

sickened had been vaccinated. In a 2005 measles

outbreak in Indiana, there were 34 cases,

including six people who had been vaccinated.

Here in California, six pertussis outbreaks

infected 24 people in 2007; only 2 of 24 were

documented as having been appropriately immunized.

A surveillance program in the mid ’90s in Canada

of infants and preschoolers found that cases of

Hib fell to between 8 and 10 cases a year from

550 a year after a vaccine program was begun, and

roughly half of those cases were among children whose vaccine failed.

Gardiner contributed reporting from Washington.

PROVE provides information on vaccines, and

immunization policies and practices that affect

the children and adults of Texas. Our mission is

to prevent vaccine injury and death and to

promote and protect the right of every person to

make informed independent vaccination decisions

for themselves and their family.

This information is not to be construed as medical OR legal advice.

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Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

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