The Dangers of Vaccine Denial

FEB. 7, 2015

IN a few backward parts of the world, extremists resist universal childhood vaccinations. Oh,
yes, one more: Some politicians in the United States.

Senator Rand Paul a doctor! told CNBC that he had delayed his own childrens
immunizations and cited many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up
with profound mental disorders after vaccines.

After an uproar, Paul walked back his remarks and tweeted a photo of himself getting a Hepatitis
A vaccination. After that irresponsible scaremongering, Id say he deserves to get shots daily for
a decade. With really long needles.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey weighed in as well, suggesting that vaccinations are partly a
matter of family choice before later seeming to retreat as well. Paul and Christie are
Republicans, but public health illiteracy is bipartisan: Vaccination rates are particularly low in
some liberal Democratic enclaves in California.

At the Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica, Calif., 68 percent of the children had
personal belief exemptions to avoid vaccination requirements, according to The Hollywood
Reporter (the school declined to comment). That suggests that kids in some wealthy areas are as
well vaccinated as children in, say, Somalia.

President Obama made ambiguous remarks in 2008 that also seemed to suggest that the science
is inconclusive about a link between vaccines and autism. And Hillary Rodham Clinton
suggested the same thing that year. (Since then, both have emphasized strong support for
vaccines.)

Lets call this out as the nonsense it is. If were going to denounce the Taliban for blocking polio
vaccinations, we should be just as quick to stand up to health illiteracy in our midst.

First, a word on vaccines: They have revolutionized public health.

Can you name the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine? Probably not: Edward Jenner is little
known today. He lived roughly when Napoleon did, and (by my back-of-envelope calculations)
he managed before he died to save many millions more lives than Napoleon cost in his wars over
the same period.

All told, up to the present, Jenners vaccine appears to have saved more than half a billion lives
since 1800, notes Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox. Jenner should be
counted as one of the great heroes of the modern world, yet he is forgotten while everybody
knows of Napoleon. Thats emblematic of the way vaccines get short shrift.
In reporting on poverty worldwide, Ive seen how much vaccines improve human well-being. I
understand how troglodytes in the Taliban or Boko Haram can be suspicious of vaccines, but
politicians here in affluent, well-educated America? Moms and dads in Santa Monica?

Granted, for a time, it was plausible to wonder about a possible link between vaccines and
autism, based on a 1998 article in The Lancet, the British medical journal. But that report was
quickly discredited by at least 13 studies, and it was retracted in 2010. The author has been
stripped of his medical license.

In Britain, for example, researchers found no change in the rate of autism diagnosis after the
1987 introduction of the M.M.R. vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, and M.M.R.
vaccination rates were similar for autistic children and for others. Likewise, studies in California
and Atlanta found no correlation between autism rates and M.M.R. vaccinations. Japan
suspended the M.M.R. vaccine because of health concerns, yet a careful study found that autism
continued to rise.

Photo

Rylee Beck Credit Photo courtesy Melissa Beck

Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, the chairman of the department of preventive medicine at the Mount
Sinai medical school, says that there may be environmental factors linked to autism, but these
relate to endocrine disrupting chemicals in consumer products, not to vaccines.

Rather than worry about a vaccine-autism connection that has been proven not to exist, parents
should be banding together and writing their elected officials to insist that chemicals be properly
tested for toxicity to children before they are allowed to enter the American market, Dr.
Landrigan told me. The Europeans have passed such legislation. We should, too.

Yet American parents remain fixated on vaccines in ways that endanger children. According to
the World Health Organization, the measles vaccination rate in 2013 stood at 91 percent in the
United States lower than in Zimbabwe or Bangladesh.

Senator Paul and Governor Christie seemed, initially at least, sympathetic to a personal choice
argument that parents should be allowed to endanger their children in some circumstances. But
thats not the issue here.

The point of immunization isnt just to protect your own child, but also to protect others.
Especially those like Rylee Beck, a 5-year-old girl in Orange, Calif., who is fighting leukemia
and cant be vaccinated. To stay safe, she depends on others getting vaccinated and creating
herd immunity to keep the disease at bay.

Rylee is in pre-K, and its a scary thing sending her there every day, her mother, Melissa Beck,
told me. In December, the family took Rylee to Disneyland and then was terrified when a
measles outbreak infected visitors to the park at that time.

It just scared us to death, Melissa Beck said. We were just holding our breath, hoping nothing
was going to come out of it. Fortunately, Rylee was not infected.

Its not just cancer patients who cant be immunized, but also infants, those with vaccine
allergies, and people with medical conditions that leave them immunocompromised. And a small
proportion of people get the vaccine but never develop immunity, so they, too, depend on others
to get vaccinated.

Thus refusing to vaccinate your children is not personal choice but public irresponsibility. You
no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to
school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isnt a private choice but a civic obligation.

Melissa Beck says that other parents are universally kind and helpful when they see Rylee, frail
and sometimes without hair, and learn that she is fighting cancer. Shes sure that other parents
arent deliberately putting children like Rylee at risk; they just dont know better.

Its a matter of life and death for these kids, Melissa said. Maybe that would change these
parents minds.