The New Pandemic of Vaccine Phobia

We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of "intelligent design."

Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery. 

No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks -- risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them. 

Six recent helpful articles:

• "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All" (Wired)

• "Nothing to Fear but the Flu Itself" (NYTimes)

• "One Vaccine Shot Seen as Protective for Swine Flu" (NYTimes)

• "The Fear Factor" (New Yorker)

• "More Antivax Distortion: The Swine Flu Version" (Discover)

• "A Public Health Expert on H1N1" (John Solomon's In Case of Emergency Blog)

I would particularly like to single out Amy Wallace's terrific new piece in Wired, in which she not only faces down the reckless myths peddled by vaccine-haters, but also beautifully articulates the underlying conditions driving these myths. Wallace writes:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling." Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. "A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society," Sagan wrote of certain Americans' embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. "There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community."

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves -- beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace -- the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans -- now regarded as a third world problem -- were a first world reality.

Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent -- in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that the following high-risk individuals get vaccinated against the H1N1 virus: 

• Pregnant women
• Household contacts and caregivers for children younger than 6 months of age 
• Healthcare and emergency medical services personnel
• All people from 6 months through 24 years of age
• Persons aged 25 through 64 years who have health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza. 

My own children were recently vaccinated.
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(Photo: Flickr/Sarah G...)

Comments

[breast fibrocystic disease]

The World Health Organization (WHO) has produced a six-stage classification that describes the process by which a novel influenza virus moves from the first few infections in humans through to a pandemic. This starts with the virus mostly infecting animals, with a few cases where animals infect people, then moves through the stage where the virus begins to spread directly between people, and ends with a pandemic when infections from the new virus have spread worldwide

[MT]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/brownlee-h1n1

The Atlantic magazine examines evidence for and against the efficacy of the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccinations, using the scientific method as the benchmark for the analysis and decrying the lack of rigorous research, the unsubstantiated claims of efficacy, and the reflexive defensiveness toward scrutiny of the research, concluding:

"The safety of the swine flu vaccine remains to be seen. In the absence of better evidence, vaccines and antivirals must be viewed as only partial and uncertain defenses against the flu. And they may be mere talismans. By being afraid to do the proper studies now, we may be condemning ourselves to using treatments based on illusion and faith rather than sound science."

That institutional science has come to resemble superstition more than the elegant tool the scientific method offers is a tragedy.

[MT]

You claim vaccines are "rational" but don't use it in this piece -- instead you make appeals to emotion, suggesting your opposition is "superstitious" and equivalent to flat-earthers. You then laud Amy Wallace who does the same thing, insults her opposition's intelligence rather than consider the science -- or lack thereof.

This is bad science reporting.

My sister is pregnant and asked me to make a recommendation on the vaccination versus the alternatives, and all I could find was similarly uninformative information, such as the NYTimes piece you highlight. The NYT piece does not give me any data with which I can make an informed decision on the H1N1, and neither have you. You are both doing a disservice to your readers and to the debate.

The NYT piece says 28 pregnant women died from complications related to H1N1 in the first four months of the outbreak. How many women were infected? How many women were pregnant? How many women die from seasonal flu complications? They say that there are a "small number" of complications from the vaccine -- WHAT IS THAT SMALL NUMBER???? Because there would have been about 5 MILLION pregnant women in the first four months of the outbreak, and only 28 died. 28/5,000,000 is actually a VERY SMALL NUMBER, but it is not enough to make a decision with, because I can't compare it to anything because people aren't talking about the science and the statistics, they are talking about ideology and whether they believe in the superstition that the FDA and CDC are reliable (hormone replacement therapy, vioxx, thalidomide, etc anyone), or the superstition that vaccines are bad.

Your blog post was just as superstitious as those it was claiming intellectual superiority to, and your readers are no better off for the lack of evidence presented, or the substitution of insults for argumentation in defending your position.

[Don D.]

The antivax thing is weird, but posts like this that seem to take the polar opposite view - all vaccines are good - are just as weird to me. The annual flu shot seems demonstrably pointless, see the excellent article at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1 for more, but this year's feeding frenzy over swine flu should be setting off everybody's b.s detectors. Instead even otherwise smart people are generally going with a version of pascal's wager as a defense for getting a flu shot all of a sudden. I don't get it.

[adora]

For Markus,
There are 2 vaccines this year because the Swine flu surfaced after the seasonal flu vaccine was already in production.
The overall fatality of the H1N1 seems to be lower than the average seasonal flu. Unlike the seasonal flu that is dangerous to old and sick, the H1N1 kills healthier people, pregnant women are 6 times more likely to die from it.

[adora]

I blame Oprah and low quality daytime television. She promotes feel good pseudoscience (along with Dr. Oz) and her followers obey religiously. Jenny McCarthy is against vaccination because she use it to explain her sos's autism. I feel very sad for her, but she needs to be stopped.
Actually, why aren't people familiar with such basic knowledge? I thought I learned about vaccination and flu in 4th/5th grade!

[Markus]

Do they also get the vaccines against the normal flu each year? Or just this one? If the latter: why?

The new flu is less dangerous than the normal one.