A Doctor’s Take on the Anti-Vaccine Movement
The Rise Of The Anti-Vaccine Movement
In the United States, we are witnessing the scientifically ignorant and sometimes deadly impact of an anti-vaccine movement. Individuals who support the movement continue to question the safety and necessity of vaccines despite extensive medical literature to the contrary.
When laboratory-produced vaccines were first introduced over 50 years ago, there were legitimate concerns about their safety. Many vaccines in their older forms were associated with the risk of rare but dangerous reactions.
The vaccines we use today have minimal risks and an extremely safe track record. They have undergone rigorous testing and scrutiny by the scientific community and have proven their effectiveness in large-scale clinical trials.
As a result, the days of school closures for measles and pertussis outbreaks have become a relic of the past. The side effects from vaccines are almost always mild. And even in the extremely rare case of a more serious allergic reaction, physicians and their staff are trained to deal with it.
Simply put, the benefits of vaccination substantially outweigh the risks.
Yet for the last two decades, fear mongers associated with the anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. and other developed countries have convinced some parents to refuse to vaccinate their kids.
The result is an erosion in health gains, both individual and collective. And in some parts of the country, we are witnessing a reversal of what many believe is one of the greatest advances in medical science in the last century.
The Fear Mongering Behind Measles And Whooping Cough
Measles and whooping cough are very serious, highly contagious respiratory diseases spread through the air by breathing, coughing or sneezing.
Although their clinical symptoms are different, both carry risks of long-term problems and even death.
Measles begins with fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. Before the introduction of a measles vaccine in 1963, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. contracted the disease annually. Thousands were permanently disabled and between 400 and 500 people died. But since 1963, reported cases fell to less than a thousand a year.
Things started changing in 1998 when a British physician published a study in “The Lancet” medical journal that falsely asserted a connection between autism and the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.
An investigation into the work revealed the research was unethical and rife with conflicts of interest. The article was filled with false and fraudulent data, and the health care risks described have been completely discredited. In 2010, the paper was fully retracted from “The Lancet,” a remarkable event in the world of peer-reviewed journals.
But the damage was done. Vaccination rates in the UK plummeted and reported cases of measles soared. In the U.S., new measles cases have tripled as of 2013, with reported outbreaks in eight American communities. The recent outbreak in New York City has sickened at least a dozen people.
Meanwhile, whooping cough, a highly contagious bacterial infection, has seen a huge increase in the number of people infected each year.
The incidence of whooping cough was relatively low in the U.S. – around 5,000 cases annually – when vaccination was the unchallenged standard of care. But the impact of the anti-vaccine rhetoric and associated fear has contributed to several outbreaks across the United States and Europe, resulting in multiple infant deaths.
In 2010, three were 9,000 cases of whooping cough reported in California alone, causing the deaths of 10 infants under the age of 1 – the most in the state since 1947.
The first whooping cough vaccine was developed in the mid-1920s. By the mid-1940s, it was used widely and often administered in combination with the diphtheria and tetanus vaccines.
In 1991, a combination vaccine called DTaP reduced the frequency of side effects and eliminated nearly all major adverse reactions from whooping cough immunization.
Unfortunately, California is now one of 19 states that allow “personal belief” exemptions for parents before their children enter school. As a result, non-medical exemptions in California have tripled between 2000 and 2010 with some schools in affluent communities reporting rates as high as 84 percent.
And as the 2010 outbreak demonstrated, clusters of whooping cough appear most frequently in these communities with higher than average non-medical exemptions.
Even if this exemption did not exist, there will always be some individuals who will not be vaccinated and others who will lose their immunity decades after the vaccine is given. Protecting these folks requires what health experts call “herd immunity.”
If a single parent does not immunize a child, the risk to that individual is low. But as the number of unvaccinated children grows, the risk of numerous people contracting and spreading the disease multiplies, creating a public health risk for a large segment of the population.
For highly contagious diseases like whooping cough and measles, herd immunity is dependent on having 95 percent of the population in a community immunized. When the immunization rate falls, the danger to both the young and elderly increases dramatically.
A Plea To Parents
We have highly safe and effective vaccines readily available to prevent many of the most dangerous childhood diseases. Yet despite decades of research that demonstrate their overwhelming positive impact on the health of our children, we are losing ground.
Before parents decide not to vaccinate their son or daughter, they need to consider the scientific evidence. They need to imagine how they will feel should their child die or experience long-term disability from an easily preventable disease.
And as a society, before we allow misinformation to threaten public health, we must recognize that vaccines today are safe and effective. Anything less is irresponsible. We owe it to our children and our communities to make vaccination universal.
PROTAGONIST | DEUTERAGONIST | TRITAGONIST 