The Anti Anti Vaccine Post
Parents are ultimately responsible for deciding what is best for their babies. Only in critical situations should a something like this statement be questioned. Yet fears about vaccine safety is threatening to become a critical, public health concern.
An article in the upcoming issue of Discover magazine attacks this controversy head-on.
Vaccines do not cause autism. That was the ruling in each of three critical test cases handed down on February 12 by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. After a decade of speculation, argument, and analysis—often filled with vitriol on both sides—the court specifically denied any link between the combination of the MMR vaccine and vaccines with thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative) and the spectrum of disorders associated with autism. But these rulings, though seemingly definitive, have done little to quell the angry debate, which has severe implications for American public health.
The idea that vaccines are responsible for an epidemic of autism is everywhere–cable news shows,blogs, celebrity magazines, and on Oprah–and has a number of high-profile, if not highly scholarly, supporters (e.g., Charlie Sheen, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey).
There is a lot of passion and emotion around this issue, and with good reason. Autism is terrible, and is often devastating to families. And for reasons no one is sure of, the incidence of autism seems to be rising rapidly. In the 70′s, the statistic was something like 1 in 10,000 kids. Today, you often hear quoted a 1 in 150 statistic.
“The irony is that vaccine skepticism—not the vaccines themselves—is now looking like the true public-health threat,” writes Chris Mooney, the author of the Discover article.
This article good does a good job of reviewing the history to led to the vaccine scare in the first place, and I would encourage you to read it, along with some of the resources below. It goes further, however,to cover why this matters:
The provaccine case starts with some undeniable facts: Vaccines are, as the IOM puts it, “one of the greatest achievements of public health.” The CDC estimates that thanks to vaccines, we have reduced morbidity by 99 percent or more for smallpox, diphtheria, measles, polio, and rubella. Averaged over the course of the 20th century, these five diseases killed nearly 650,000 people annually. They now kill fewer than 100. That is not to say vaccines are perfectly safe; in rare cases they can cause serious, well-known adverse side effects. But what researchers consider unequivocally unsafe is to avoid them. As scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently found while investigating whooping cough outbreaks in and around Michigan, “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptors pose a risk to the whole community.”
The fact that the vaccination program has, over the years, been so successful is one of the reasons why antivaccination sentiments have thrived. We rarely see most of the diseases that the vaccines protect us against. It’s hard to be afraid of such an enemy that has not been around in a while, and now we’re a generation or two removed from the devastation these diseases cause.
Given enough vaccine exemptions and localized outbreaks, it is possible that largely vanquished diseases could become endemic again. (That is precisely what happened with measles in 2008 in the U.K., due to skepticism there about the MMR vaccine, where the original, faulty reports came from.) The public-health costs of such a development would be enormous—and they would not impact everyone equally. If vaccine rates start to drop as a whole, it won’t matter that an individual did or didn’t get the shots, and the people that are going to be affected the most are going to be people who live in poor, crowded conditions.
Resources:
AntiAntiVax–The Truth About the Evils of Vaccination
Viewpoints:
Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On
My Child Has Autism and I Vaccinate
A Life Less Ordinary: A Deadly History
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