Vaccine Skeptics vs. Your Kids

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/09/practical-

values-immune-to-reason.html

Vaccine Skeptics vs. Your Kids

By Arthur

September/October 2008 Issue

In the last trimester of her pregnancy, Helena Moran caught a cough

that she couldn't get rid of. She figured she'd picked up the germ—

whatever it was—from one of her patients at a Boulder dentist's

office. But the real nightmare began after her daughter, Evelina, was

born: The baby began to cough and cough, and then she'd curl up in a

little ball and turn blue. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed

with whooping cough. She spent the next five weeks in intensive care

and suffered permanent lung damage.

It turned out that by working in Boulder—one of the wealthiest, most

well-educated towns in the country—Moran had put herself at risk of

contracting a disease that largely disappeared after widespread

vaccination against it began in the 1950s. Since the early 1990s,

whooping cough has periodically whipped through Boulder, where a

large percentage of parents do not immunize their children, public

health officials say.

There's a Boulder in almost every state. Childhood vaccination rates

nationwide are near record levels, in part thanks to a Clinton-era

program that guarantees free vaccines for the poor. But as I learned

while researching my book, Vaccine, a history of immunization,

resistance is also growing, especially among affluent and well-

educated people—to the point where living in a place with a high

percentage of PhDs is a risk factor for whooping cough. " These are

people who know better, " ucla whooping cough expert Cherry told

me, " but they don't know enough. "

Vaccine resisters are motivated by a range of convictions—

immunization isn't " natural " (the wellness set), it's suspect because

it's government mandated (Christian home-schoolers), and so on—but

the movement got a huge boost from the controversy over the mercury-

laden preservative thimerosal, which some theorized might be linked

to autism. That link has been disproven—by, if nothing else, the fact

that autism rates remained steady after pediatricians and public

health authorities told manufacturers to stop making thimerosal-

containing childhood vaccines in 1999. But the anti-vaccine movement

has kept going, finding ever new reasons to distrust immunization.

Some, including celebrity pediatrician Dr. W. Sears, have

raised fears about aluminum in the shots, while others—like the 2,000

or so protesters at a Washington rally this June—simply charge that

kids get " too many vaccines " full of " dangerous toxins " that

overwhelm their immune systems.

The skeptics have many things going for them: our justifiable

distrust of medical authority; our admiration for do-it-yourselfers,

mavericks, and the self-taught; even a dose of celebrity appeal from

the likes of Charlie Sheen, McCarthy, and Jim Carrey. What most

of them don't have is an understanding of the science. Thanks to

vaccines, polio and diphtheria are now pretty well confined to the

world's medical backwaters. But tetanus lives everywhere in soil and

rusty nails, and as many as 6 million Americans are exposed to

whooping cough each year, according to surveys of blood antibodies.

This year, measles has returned, with the worst US outbreak since

2001. Most of the patients have been unvaccinated children and

adults, and nearly a quarter have been hospitalized. In Third World

countries with no measles vaccination, the disease killed nearly a

quarter-million children in 2006.

Current medical practice is to vaccinate babies against whooping

cough beginning at two months of age. Widespread vaccination

creates " herd immunity " —the disease has fewer hosts, which means

there are fewer people to spread it to those at serious risk, from

immunocompromised adults (think chemotherapy patients) to newborns

such as Evelina Moran and Teddy Hickenlooper, the infant son of

Denver mayor Hickenlooper, who caught whooping cough from an

unvaccinated older child in 2002.

Here's where we get to the deeper, fundamentally progressive reason

for vaccination: The point is to protect not merely ourselves, but

the community. To not vaccinate is to threaten the immunological

commons, the array of trillions of antibodies and T cells that

decades of vaccination have built up in our bodies, draping a web of

germ-fighting agents around our most vulnerable neighbors. To not

vaccinate is to affirm an overweening individuality. It's a form of

selfishness.

Right now, in many states, all it takes to get an exemption from

vaccine requirements is signing a form. Some, including a group of

doctors at s Hopkins University, have proposed making it harder—

allowing a philosophical exemption only after parents demonstrate a

good-faith effort to educate themselves.

True, medical experts have failed us before; to make sure they are

doing their job, we need to strongly support the public health

programs whose job it is to watch out for serious adverse reactions

to vaccines. But while questioning authority is healthy, facts are

facts. If vaccines really were responsible for autism, it would be

too much to ask parents to do the altruistic thing. But more than a

dozen studies have failed to discover such a link—and not a single

legitimate study has shown that one exists. I have spent many, many

hours reading these studies and talking to vaccine scientists. I find

no reason to believe Jim Carrey more than I believe them. Call me a

dupe of the establishment, but I'd rather trust the doctors.

Arthur is the author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of

Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver.