No Vaccinations = No School

That’s the law in California since July of last year. If the kids are not current with the required vaccinations, they do not get to attend public schools. 

Is this an attack on our freedom?  Is this the nanny state overruling decisions that should belong to parents?  I don’t think so - and I’m an advocate of freedom.

Upon signing the bill into law the governor released a statement saying, "The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases.  While it's true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”  This is absolutely true, yet people continue to fear vaccinating their kids based on fraudulent science by a British doctor who wanted to show a relationship between vaccinations and autism so badly that he falsified results to reach that conclusion.

Wikipedia gives a good summary of the history.  “Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 1957, Eton, England) is a British former gastroenterologist and medical researcher who was struck off the UK medical register for his fraudulent 1998 research paper and other misconduct in support of the now-discredited claim that there was a link between the administration of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and the appearance of autism and bowel disease.” [Emphasis added.]  The next two paragraphs of the article give more information about financial conflicts of interest, ethical problems and withdrawal of support by reputable organizations.

The New York Times archives for Wakefield contains many telling entries including:  “Anti-vaccine film pulled from Tribeca Festival; A measles outbreak in Britain would never have occurred if parents had respected the proven safety record of vaccine; Autism Fraud and Why some still won’t accept that Andrew Wakefield is wrong.”

Yet an NBC report not too many weeks ago was headlined:  “Vaccine Skeptic Message Gets Bolder,”  and going on to say, “The skeptics have taken on a brasher, bolder tone in recent months.”  Once only demanding safer vaccines, “an increasing number now say most or all vaccines are dangerous, and some accuse the federal government, physicians and the mainstream media of colluding with drug companies to deliberately poison children using vaccines.”  Do they believe that saying it longer and louder will make their arguments true?  This is behavior that was once associated with crazy people. 

Do they trust information from a discredited former doctor, celebrities with no medical training and a Facebook support group over that from medical experts?  Do they think raising the ante from unsafe vaccines to intentionally poisoning children to line corporate pockets will make a faulty argument more powerful?  Apparently so.

But these people in their naïve acceptance of a scientific fraud are putting everyone else’s children at risk.  One or two kids in a classroom of vaccinated children may not be a problem.  Who are they going to catch the diseases from if everyone else is vaccinated?  But as the number grows so does the possibility of an outbreak – vaccines are not one hundred percent effective.

This is not an issue of freedom, so much as one of responsibility and critical thinking.  From dangerous behavior comes potentially fatal consequences, and unfortunately, at some point the authorities are forced to step in.

Anti-vaccine Parents - What Are The Odds?

Sometimes critical thinking can be difficult, even painful, but that does not make it any less important or advisable.

Some people are afraid to fly on an airplane.  Tell them over and over that the ride to the airport is statistically more dangerous than the flight and it does not change their minds.  In the car, especially if they are driving, there is a sense of control.  In the airplane, with both the pilot and the ground out of sight, already frightened people will feel at the mercy of someone else’s skill at best and more likely at the mercy of fate.  Their unfounded fear causes inconvenience only to themselves or perhaps to family who must accommodate them.  That same sense of not being in control is common to other fears but sometimes the stakes are much higher.

In America the fight against measles continues, as does the campaign to get parents to vaccinate.  Looking at it purely logically, measles is very contagious, around the 90% level; and the probability of vaccination side effects or other related problems is far lower.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), moderate problems from the MMR vaccine range from 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 30,000 for children.  Severe problems occur in less than 1 in one million cases.  The potential for a problem when unvaccinated hugely outweighs the opposite decision.  From a pure critical thinking point, it would be a no-brainer, although it doesn’t exactly play out that way.

The USA Today reports:  “a new study finds that more than 70% of children's doctors have agreed to parents' requests to delay vaccinations, even though most believe that puts children at risk.”  A smaller sample of doctors reported delay or opt-out rates of more than 10% - that’s ten percent of parents not children.

The article goes on to explain:  “More parents have begun skipping selected vaccines or delaying others in recent years, sometimes out of concern that immunizations cause autism, an idea that has been debunked in dozens of studies.”  What they don’t mention is that a subsequent investigation showed the originally cited link between the MMR vaccine and autism was based on fabricated evidence, data made up to fit the desired outcome, and that its author was banned from practicing medicine due to the egregious nature of the offense.  By then it was too late; the false information was already out; and it’s so much easier to scare people than to unscare them.

Parents were left with an unreasonable fear of vaccines and relative unfamiliarity with the seriousness of the disease.  Most have no idea that measles can cause severe complications and, in one or two out of a thousand cases, be fatal.  Ordinarily that would be nothing to fool around with. 

Some of the parents who are opting out responded to AP questions with their reasoning.  They said things like, “some research points to inconsistencies, unknowns or negative effects that deserve further investigation” and worry about “how exposure to chemicals, bad nutrition and stress can affect genes and health,” considering vaccine additives and preservatives as some of those questionable chemicals.

So the debate goes on.  Usually a few unvaccinated do not pose a problem, because the herd immunity threshold, typically between 80% and 95% depending on the contagion level of the particular disease, protects the unprotected by surrounding them with immune individuals.  This does not hold where people living in the same areas and communicating in person or by social media tend to think alike and exchange similar views, so some geographical pockets are forming where the vaccination rate is as low as 40%.

Using the fear-of-flying analogy, it’s easy to understand and sympathize.  When parents are scared and feel a lack of control with so many unknowns and more perceived unknowns, how do they take control?  They do it by saying no.  It is a huge concern when parents act in such a way as to put their children in danger.

Applying critical thinking to overcome the emotional reaction can be both difficult and painful.  It’s often not a matter of being uneducated or unintelligent.  Fear plays a big role.

Is US Becoming a Third World Country?

Lack of science literacy, which I have commented on before, is more than knowing that gasoline explodes and should be handled with care.  Not understanding science and medicine leads to serious problems.  Children are dying.

When we look at news reports from less-developed countries about how superstition and religious zealots stand in the way of good medicine, we may feel a mixture of sadness and superiority, sadness because people, especially children are sick and dying for no good reason, superiority because Americans know better.  Reports from Nigeria tell us that gunmen “suspected of belonging to a radical Islamic sect shot and killed at least nine women who were taking part in a polio vaccination drive.”  The attack “signaled a new wave of anger targeting immunization drives in Nigeria, where clerics once claimed the vaccines were part of a Western plot to sterilize young girls.”  Elsewhere, polio vaccines find violent opposition because “some mullahs have preached against it, claiming falsely that the oral vaccine leaves Pakistani children sterile.” 

Americans would never act like that, or would they?  Fear of Autism from a long-ago-discredited report claiming a connection with MMR shots leads many parents in the US to oppose the vaccinations.  Recently this has led to a tripling of measles cases in the US, where the disease had been nearly wiped out, as it was brought in by travelers from overseas.  For the facts showing that the supposed MMR-Autism connection is untrue, see my April 19, 2013 comments.

Flu shots are wrongly associated with all kinds of bad side effects.  If that were true, it seems strange that doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would recommend flu shots every year.  Conspiracy theorists will say that they are in league with the drug companies who make the vaccine, that they are willing to put the health of many people at risk just to make a profit.  Here is a link to a site addressing those concerns.  It dispels 25 of those myths that keep people away from the flu vaccines, decisions which contribute to the deaths of thousands.  The CDC lists influenza as the 9^th leading cause of death in 2011 with over 50,000 cases.

Similarly, parents refuse to get their preteens HPV shots.  On December 4 Katie Couric aired a show on this.  She admitted getting her daughters vaccinated, but for the sake of good television presented both sides of the issue.  Prior to airing, the show “teaser creates the false impression that the vaccine can kill, despite the fact that no evidence supports that conclusion. It also puts forth the idea that there is a controversy around the vaccine. There is certainly a vocal minority asserting that the vaccine is dangerous, and social conservatives who vilify the vaccine due to religious beliefs, but these are not real controversies.”  Such TV shows excuse their format as presenting both sides of a controversy.  On one side we have medical evidence, on the other side opinions of non-experts.  There are not two sides, only the truth.

Finally, some parents are denying newborns Vitamin K shots for fear of Leukemia.  Again they have been giving erroneous information, as this link makes clear.

When we see stories of children dying in third world countries due to lack of vaccinations based on false assumptions, misinformation, religious prejudices and ignorance, we have every right to feel sad – but superior?  I don’t think so.